I love bureaucracies and think they are often the whiping boy of politicians who don’t wan to make tough decisions. Sometimes though, they veer out of control to the point that one seriously cannot tell the difference between parody and reality:
In a document that went out from the Federal Emergency Management Agency, the agency asked for firefighters with very specific skills and who were capable of working in austere conditions. When they got to a center in Atlanta, they found out their jobs would be public relations.
“Our job was to advertise a phone number for FEMA,” said Portage Assistant Fire Chief Bill Lundy. “We were going to be given shirts and hats with a phone number on it and flyers, and sent to shelters, and we were going to pass out flyers.”
Lundy and Calhoun said they don’t want to bash FEMA or its mission, Rogers reported. They said they only want to help, and that there were plenty of other firefighters in the room who felt the same way.
“There was almost a fight,” said Portage Assistant Fire Chief Joe Calhoun. “There was probably 700 firefighters sitting in the room getting this training, and it dawned on them what we were going to be doing. And then it got bad from there.”
Lundy and Calhoun’s first task was an eight-hour course on sexual harassment and equal opportunity employment procedures, Rogers reported. Neither firefighter would be involved in technical rescues of trapped people or any of their other specialties.
I stand by my previous statements about the inherent incompetencies of the Federal Government.
And I’ll say to IlliniPundit that the Federal Government as run by the criminals in the Bush administration is a different animal. Bush deliberately appointed a hack, people died as a result, and both of them belong in jail.