Tuesday.....International.....Trilateral Is Not A Football Term

David Gergen worked for four different presidents and has been in the public eye through his commentary rather consistently since then. Today, he appeared in that august weekly magazine Parade, a few pages before "questions about celebrities" and just before "ask Marylon vos Savant" and sounded very homey as if he's talking to the girls who just had a rough workout on the treadmill while watching The View. His articles starts off with Americans have been rightly frustrated by the slow, clumsy response to the Gulf oil spill by both BP and the government. There may have been a grain of truth to that but what he has done is set the reader up for his solution to a different problem that requires more government power. He says it's an inescapable conclusion, at least to him, that we need to create a command structure for disaster response modeled on the military. He then references Pearl Harbor and the effectiveness of our military to recruit the reader's trust. He wants to bring those who do battle against natural disasters into the same design, mentioning Homeland Security, FEMA, the Coast Guard and Centers For Disease Control etc., the etc. presumably meaning the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms and others. Here's the problem as he sees it, laws and regulations patched together over the years have given large, often vague and confusing responsibilities to many players, the result is uncertainty and delays. He lauds President Obama's mugging of BP for $20 billion, which he describes as forcing BP to cough (the money) up. Maybe I'm missing something here but I would think the answer to Katrina and the Gulf would be "less" government control and "more" freedom to act by those with the buses, sand bags and oil booms. He then waxes "elderly wisdom" in for reasons no one fully understands, times have become more dangerous...It is also estimated that 91% of Americans now live in places with moderate-to-high risk of natural disaster or terrorist attack. He says that what we need to do first and foremost is to disentangle the messy laws and regulations that now exist, (ok....but did Sheryl Crow help him write this piece?) setting up a clear command structure for major disasters which is under Federal leadership (not so good.) Rahm "never let a serious crisis go to waste" Emanuel is reported to be leaving the White House soon, maybe he can head this new non messy command structure? He then hammers BP a couple of more times and says that we need a clone of General David Petraeus on the domestic scene to knock heads. Hmm, why the plug for the general? One more hero, Winston Churchill, is mentioned to assure us that the writer is on the right side. If someone with less camaraderie with the "global elites" of this world had written this article, and if he didn't use phrases like we must unleash them to attack a crisis with full authority I might give some more thought to the advice. As it stands, more Federal power for hurricanes, a power that might be considered useful in the political arenas, is not the answer. Turning Winston Churchill's phrase around, let's give the states the tools so they can finish their job.