“Mr. President, You Are Such a Man”
You just can’t make this shit up. Frances Fragos Townsend has resigned from her position as Assistant to the President for Homeland Security and Counterterrorism. Here is Fran Townsend’s resignation letter. One section includes the following:
In 1937, the playwright Maxwell Anderson wrote of President George Washington: There are some men who lift the age they inhabit, til all men walk on higher ground in their lifetime. Mr. President, you are such man.
Townsend deserves to be remembered, first of all, for her obscene failure to identify Hurricane Katrina as a major threat to national security in September 2005. That fiasco although qualified her to lead the shameless cover-your-ass operation entitled Lessons Learned. Townsend could be relied upon of course to go on pretending that the devastation wrought by a Gulf-coast hurricane was something other than entirely predictable. Yet to get a true flavor of the sycophancy involved, here are the opening paragraphs from her cover letter addressed to Bush once the lessons had been assembled:
You often remind us that your most solemn obligation as President is to protect the American people. And every day and night, millions of men and women throughout the Federal government—both civilian and military—work to achieve that objective. Given the dangerous world in which we live, they do an outstanding job.
Despite all we do, however, Hurricane Katrina was a deadly reminder that we can and must do better, and we will. This is the first and foremost lesson we learned from the death and devastation caused by our country’s most destructive natural disaster: No matter how prepared we think we are, we must work every day to improve.
These are the fucking folks that Bush has put in charge of keep you, me, and the American public safe.
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