Hurricane Charlie.

Looks like Charlie Mahtesian's story about FEMA and the Florida election has hit a nerve among Mailbag contributors. With all due respect to those who are up in arms, I don't think the piece suggests that FEMA was engaged in a nefarious political scheme to aid the Bush reelection effort. Rather, the agency simply did what it was supposed to do--and did it very well. The fact that this certainly didn't hurt the president shouldn't be taken as an insinuation that FEMA would have given anything less than its full effort regardless of the political circumstances. So why the hubbub? Maybe this is one of those times when an editor (umm, that would be yours truly) slapped a headline ("How FEMA delivered Florida for Bush") on a piece that was just a wee bit more sensationalistic than the nuanced story the writer delivered.