Brownie points . . .

. . . to everyone but himself, when appearing before the mostly Republican "bipartisan" committee assembled, it would seem, to offer him an opportunity to shift blame --- er, explain himself. It was the Governor. It was the Mayor. It was a failure of communication between the Governor and the Mayor (Brown's contribution to resolving that problem, from his own lips, was to tell them to communicate). It was that Louisiana was dysfunctional. Oh, yes, and there was a problem of inadequate funding of FEMA and its decimation from above, but that was sort of a toss-off.

What Michael Brown and his friends in the administration — and others who would defend him — fail to appreciate is that Mayor Nagin and Governor Blanco, by virtue of their very jobs, are generalists. They are not trained exclusively to manage emergencies, as the FEMA director is expected to be.

Mayors and governors have responsibilities from a to z, including having a certain level of knowledge about how to handle emergencies, whereas the job of FEMA director is that of a specialist; Mr. Brown was paid to know how to manage the emergency. Period.

He was supposed to manage the emergency, not tell others what he thought they should do and go home to watch television.