Committing Hara-Kiri For Your Emperor
by digby
WASHINGTON (CNN) — The former emergency management chief who quit amid widespread criticism over his handling of the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina said he received an e-mail before his resignation stating President Bush was glad to see the Oval Office had dodged most of the criticism.
Michael Brown, former director of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, said Friday that he received the e-mail five days before his resignation from a high-level White House official whom he declined to identify.
The e-mail stated that Bush was relieved that Brown — and not Bush or Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff — was bearing the brunt of the flak over the government’s handling of Katrina.
The September 2005 e-mail reads: “I did hear of one reference to you, at the Cabinet meeting yesterday. I wasn’t there, but I heard someone commented that the press was sure beating up on Mike Brown, to which the president replied, ‘I’d rather they beat up on him than me or Chertoff.’ “
The sender adds, “Congratulations on doing a great job of diverting hostile fire away from the leader.”
[…]
Brown’s attorney, Andy Lester, who first wrote about the e-mail in the conservative weekly publication Human Events, said the White House was handling the situation in “a cowardly way.”
“What the White House was actually doing was taking some stories that got started in the media and pushing them and pushing them until everything got diverted to Mike,” Lester said. “Mike Brown was being made the scapegoat.”
I think the e-mailer is a guy named Joe Hagen, who Brown mentions every time he’s interviewed as being a good friend and a stand up guy.
It’s very likely that it’s true. After all, Bush has said similar things before:
During a trip to West Point on June 1, Bush pulled White aside for a private talk. “As long as they’re hitting you on Enron, they’re not hitting me,” said Bush, according to this Army official. “That’s your job. You’re the lightning rod for this administration.”
The Bushies are counting on being vindicated by history as Truman was. I don’t think so. This president is on record, more than once, saying that he expects his underlings to fall on their swords for him. It’s not exactly “the buck stops here.” History will properly record him as a coward, a dunce and a failure.
.