What can Brown do for you?

Get off the federal payroll and get the hell out of our lives.

"Embattled" former FEMA head Michael Brown testified in front of Congress yesterday, and if anyone was feeling sorry for him being the President's Designated Fall Guy for the Katrina Fiasco, well, you would need to spend a little time with this guy. You'd be guaranteed to lose all sympathy for him.

"Brownie," as our ever-childish Chief Exec referred to him, flung mud and blame everywhere. The Louisiana state and locals, described as "dysfunctional." The Department of Homeland Security, who he said cut FEMA money and staff. Even to the White House, who he stated he kept apprised of Katrina's potentially ruinous landfall. For himself, he only desired pity. After all, he was expected to do a good job working with these handicaps, along with an uncharacteristically confrontational news media?

Now, I have never testified in a Congressional hearing. Hope to never have to. It can't be easy. Buttholes of all political stripes standing ready to rough you up to get a soundbite on that evening's news. But Brown's defensive posture was completely disingenuous. No, he wasn't over his head at FEMA. And that famous Today Show interview where he claimed to have no knowledge of conditions at the Superdome? Oh, then he "mis-spoke."

What we were seeing yesterday was classic tactics of the Bush Administration, enacted by someone without the mastery or backup of their normal practitioners. Brown's rhetorical approach was the same as, say, Donald Rumsfeld, in any random Pentagon briefing on the war: Be confrontational, shift blame, deny, deny, deny. But Brownie no longer has Bush's coattails to hide behind. And he lacked the unflappable, reptilian cool of Rumsfeld.

One would hope, when other Bush Administration cronies trot out the same gameplan in later hearings, people will remember the bad taste Michael Brown left in their mouth and react accordingly. But for now, we'll have to be content with the idea that not even Arabian horses are returning his calls this morning.