Editorial: Putting a price on bad judgment

Sunday, Nov. 27, 2005 | 7:55 a.m.

It seems the one disaster over which ousted FEMA director Michael Brown hopes to triumph is his own career.

Brown -- whose mishandling of the Federal Emergency Management Agency's response to Hurricane Katrina made him the poster boy for the ills created by cronyism within the Bush administration -- has announced he will work as a private consultant to help others avoid making his mistakes.

In a recent interview with the Rocky Mountain News, Brown told the Denver newspaper that Hurricane Katrina "showed how bad disasters can be, and there's an incredible need for individuals and businesses to understand how important preparedness can be."

This "expertise" will come from the man who was sending his staff e-mails asking how his attire looked on television while people were dying in New Orleans. He is the man who implied to Ted Koppel on ABC's "Nightline" that despite widespread coverage on national TV, FEMA officials didn't know of the misery and grief suffered by survivors stuck at New Orleans' crowded convention center.

Those comments were "a mistake," Brown recently told the Rocky Mountain News. "When I said, 'We just learned about that,' people misinterpreted that as, 'You mean this has been going on for 24 hours and you don't know about it?' "

It is pretty easy to interpret the images of people who died sitting upright in lawn chairs while waiting for water and food and the pictures of people sobbing and begging for help of any kind. They showed a federal emergency response agency rendered basically useless by bad leadership and tangled bureaucracy.

But soon, our local agencies and businesses can pay -- again -- for this pitiful pitchman's propaganda. It would be almost comical, if it wasn't certain that some organizations will hire this second-rate political climber.

The most distasteful part of Brown's plan isn't that he hopes to re-package and sell his ineptitude. It's that Americans will pay for such nonsense. Famous people can sell anything here, even when their deeds are famously bad.