CNN has an illuminating piece on its website about the disparity between the statements of FEMA chief Michael Brown, and reports from people on the scene in New Orleans. Is Brown just severely out of touch? Or is he lying? In either case, he is clearly incompetent, over his head, or just plain doesn’t care, and should resign. Here’s a sampling of his compassionate, understanding comments as reported in the CNN article:

On conditions in the Convention Center: “We learned about that (Thursday), so I have directed that we have all available resources to get that convention center to make sure that they have the food and water and medical care that they need.”

On uncollected corpses: “That’s not been reported to me, so I’m not going to comment. Until I actually get a report from my teams that say, “We have bodies located here or there,” I’m just not going to speculate.”

On Hospital evacuations: “I’ve just learned today that we … are in the process of completing the evacuations of the hospitals, that those are going very well.”

On violence and civil unrest: “I’ve had no reports of unrest, if the connotation of the word unrest means that people are beginning to riot, or you know, they’re banging on walls and screaming and hollering or burning tires or whatever. I’ve had no reports of that.”

On the federal response: “Considering the dire circumstances that we have in New Orleans, virtually a city that has been destroyed, things are going relatively well.”

On security: “I actually think the security is pretty darn good. There’s some really bad people out there that are causing some problems, and it seems to me that every time a bad person wants to scream of cause a problem, there’s somebody there with a camera to stick it in their face.”