In whom do we trust?

Fire Michael Brown now.\nIn case you haven't heard by now, Brown is the head of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, a branch of the Department of Homeland Security. He has quickly become the symbol of abject government failure as citizens question what went wrong with the response to Hurricane Katrina. President Bush was right to remove him from the scene in New Orleans, but Brown is still nominally the director of FEMA, and accountability will not be served until he is terminated.\nProminent columnist and blogger Andrew Sullivan has called for the firing of Brown; he's compiled a list of various others who have joined the chorus. Count me in. As I write this, Sullivan has identified more than 40 separate pleas for Brown's termination.The calls range from obscure blogs with limited readership all the way up to The New York Times editorials. As Sullivan says, "This is not a liberal-conservative issue. This is a competence issue ... Fire Brown now."\nHow did Brown ever obtain a position of national security? Before joining FEMA, Brown was forced out of his previous job, a 10-year stint running horse shows. He became the director of FEMA when the outgoing leader, his college roommate, recommended him. \nIf Bush wants to reward unqualified sycophants who cannot properly oversee horse shows, he should at least have the sense to place them in inconsequential positions with limited power, not in charge of FEMA.\nI hate playing the blame game, but I must do so to illustrate a larger point: Americans are losing their trust in government. And they should. By failing to save lives that could have easily been saved, the government has failed its end of the social contract. When we witness report after report about the poorly executed government response to the disaster, the boundaries we create with political ideologies fade away, leaving Americans in disbelief. If this is the response to a disaster we saw coming, what would happen during an unexpected terrorist strike?\nAmericans traditionally rally to their president when national tragedy strikes. Even President Bush, widely regarded as one of the most divisive in recent history, saw his approval rating soar to 90 percent after Sept. 11. \nSo far, Bush's ratings have remained comparable to their levels before Katrina -- the low 40s -- but they will only decrease as the waters recede. We will learn more bad news in the form of higher death counts and details of more governmental incompetence and failure. \nIf it ever became necessary for the federal government to slaughter a million people, I don't doubt it could do the job and do it well. But I cannot and never will trust it to save a single life. Yesterday marked yet another anniversary of Sept. 11. Four years after that fateful day, the trust Americans were willing to place in the federal government to protect them is washing away as much as the city of New Orleans. \nPerhaps it is already gone.