(White House photo by Eric Draper)According to news reports, President Bush is considering turning over emergency response to the Pentagon.
It's a bad idea, and it will just make matters worse.
Leave aside the constitutional problems. The major flaw is that such a responsibility overburdens a military already stretched to the limit in Iraq and Afghanistan. Simply put, there aren't enough troops to do the job--and if there were, it would hurt America's ability to respond to terrorist or other military attacks.
So, even if passed, it would not work.
But more than that, it shows that Bush is in desperation mode--unable to govern democratically, he seeks to resort to military solutions to domestic problems. That he's even thinking this way, it seems to me, is evidence that he has "lost it."
The US had dealt with flood, fire, hurricane, earthquake, and myriad natural calamities for hundreds of years without turning into a military dictatorship. If Bush can't find civilian solutions to civil problems--he ought to resign.
