Believe it or not, there’s a new mission beckoning in the soggy devastation of Hurricane Katrina for Ward Connerly.

Most of you know the guy.

Connerly is a former University of California regent who, after spearheading the end of affirmative action in college admissions there, has somehow decided that his life’s calling is to work to end any advantages that give black people like himself -- people who discrimination has historically left out of the progress loop -- a break. After failing miserably to get a racial privacy initiative passed in California, he has been rabidly running around trying to get Michigan to ban some affirmative action programs.

Homeboy just won’t quit.

But I hope that Connerly, who decries affirmative action as an unjust system that favors race, gender and ethnicity over merit, is paying close attention to the Katrina debacle. Because if he is, he ought to turn his vitriol away from blacks, women and other minorities who benefit from what he believes are affirmative actions’ special privileges, and turn it towards those who benefit from the privileges of political patronage.

Most of the time, those beneficiaries tend to be overwhelmingly white and male. Merit tends to be an afterthought if it’s thought about at all. And nowhere was this problem more glaringly apparent than in the way that President George W. Bush -- an affirmative action foe himself -- stacked the Federal Emergency Management Agency with cronies rather than experts.

All were utterly unqualified. And a whole lot of black people in New Orleans wound up dead because of it.

According to The Washington Post, five of the eight top FEMA officials had virtually no experience in handling disasters. Besides not having any experience Michael D. Brown, the now-disgraced former head of FEMA, couldn’t even handle his last job as commissioner of a horse sporting group. Yet those facts didn’t stop Bush -- even in the wake of the unprecedented carnage of Sept. 11 -- from making him head of the nation’s top emergency response agency.

All Brown needed for that job was for Joe M. Allbaugh, his college friend and Bush’s 200 campaign manager, to put in a good word for him.

Apparently, Allbaugh did that. And the Bush cronies kept lucking out.

According to the Post, FEMA Chief of Staff Patrick J. Rhode’s only claim to fame before joining that agency was as a television reporter. He wound up in the circle by dint of working with Bush’s 2000 campaign, as did FEMA Deputy Chief of Staff Brooks D. Altshuler.

Put together, these guys didn’t have enough emergency management expertise to rescue a baby from a bathtub, much less a major American city inundated by floods. But here, being able to save lives -- or even caring about saving lives -- didn’t get them their jobs.

Their connections did.

Of course, I’m not shocked that Bush was able to get away with this. Over the years, the right wing has been able to capitalize on the public’s short memory and its denial of racial injustice to the point where the faces of white males like Brown have been emerging as the faces of victims; victims who are up against a system of political correctness that plays on white guilt to grant college slots, contracts and jobs to incompetent minorities. The question is no longer whether affirmative action is a tool for giving minorities a chance to prove they have the right stuff, but whether it endangers lives if, say, a black surgeon who entered medical school with lower test scores gets to operate on someone. Never mind that the black surgeon had to pass a huge number of tests while in school, and qualifying experiences to get a license to take people’s lives into his hands.

Obviously, that’s something that Brown and his boys didn’t have to worry about.

So in the wake of Katrina, here lies a new mission for Connerly. If he and his minions so fervently believe that it’s abhorrent to consider race, gender or ethnicity in considering whether someone gets into a college, or gets a contract or a job, they ought to believe that it’s just as abhorrent for woefully unqualified white men like Brown to get top government jobs based on who they know rather than their qualifications. He ought to start petition drives to put an end to that practice.

Because while affirmative action may disappoint a few misguided white people who believe they are owed all the opportunity, so far as I know, no one has died from it.

That’s more than I can say for the system that got Brown his job.