STEYN: A faster disaster master

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By Mark Steyn

COMMENTARY:

In just about his last act as president, George W. Bush has declared Washington, D.C., a federal disaster area.

No, seriously. I'm not setting up some lame-o punch line here, like we used to do a decade back in the good old Monica days: "President Clinton today declared his pants a federal disaster area," etc. What happened last week was that the Bush administration formally declared a federal emergency in the District of Columbia.

So what was it? An ice storm? A hurricane?

No, it's the Inauguration of his successor. The inauguration is scheduled to make landfall tomorrow and wreak havoc all night long, as Category Five conga lines buckle highways round town and emergency busboy crews find themselves overwhelmed as they struggle to clear drained champagne flutes. So the mayor, Adrian M. Fenty, put in a request for more federal money, and, apparently, the easiest way to sluice the cash to him no questions asked was for the president to declare a state of emergency in the District and funnel however many extra gazillions he wants through FEMA - the Federal Emergency Management Agency.

"I don't know if anybody's ever done that," said Dana Perino, the White House press secretary.

Indeed. One reason nobody has ever done that before is because a presidential Inauguration is not (to be boringly technical about it) an "emergency." It's penciled in well in advance - in this case, so well in advance that for years Democrats have been driving around with "1-20-09" bumper stickers on the back of their Priuses. Emergency-wise, that's the equivalent of Hurricane Dan Rather wrapped around a lamppost in his sou'wester hanging there in eager anticipation every night for half a decade.

Generally speaking, changes of government are only "emergencies" in the livelier banana republics where this week's president-for-life suddenly spots the machete-wielding mob scrambling over the palace walls so nimbly he barely has time to dial the Liberian branch of FEMA and put in a request for extra Portapotties and a rope-line management team.

The proposition that a new federal administration is itself a federal emergency is almost too perfect an emblem of American government in the 21st century. FEMA was created in the 1970s initially to coordinate the emergency response to catastrophic events such as a nuclear attack. But there weren't a lot of those even in the Carter years, so, as is the way with bureaucracies, FEMA just growed like Topsy. In his first year in office, Bill Clinton declared a then record-setting 58 federal emergencies.

By the end of the 1990s, Mother Nature was finding it hard to come up with a meteorological phenomenon that didn't qualify as a federal emergency. Heavy rain in the Midwest? Call FEMA! Light snow in Vermont? FEMA! Fifty-seven under cloudy skies in California? Let those FEMA trailers roll!