Hey, don’t look at me. I didn’t say it. Michael Brown said it. On live TV no less:
“My biggest mistake was not recognizing by Saturday that Louisiana was dysfunctional,” Brown said. (He means Saturday, August 27, before the hurricane struck.)
Wow. You’ve got to admit, to say something like that took a lot of balls. Of course, he’s already resigned from FEMA (only to be hired back as a consultant to investigate what went wrong - more on that later), so he’s really got nothing to lose. The press has been trashing him for weeks, and rightly so. Katrina is Brown’s worse failure, but it was hardly his first. This one was just so big, no one could ignore it.
Brown wants to blame the governments of Louisiana and New Orleans for what happened. He’s not completely off the mark. Lousisiana once had a gubenatorial election where the choices between candidates were a former three-term governor everyone knew was a crook, or an ex-wizard in the KKK. And this wasn’t in the 1800s, either. It was 1992. So there’s a long history of graft and incompetence running through Louisiana politics, but Brown doesn’t get to escape that easily.
It seems that when Hurricane Frances hit Florida in 2004, $21 million was paid to residents of Miami in the form of disaster relief. There’s only one problem: Frances didn’t strike anywhere close to Miami. It hit far to the north, but FEMA just declared Miami-Dade a disaster area without even checking to see if it had been damaged. They even paid for a funeral in Miami, although no one died. (The effects of France on Miami were no worse than a bad thunderstorm.)
But wait, there’s more. It seems FEMA has paid for the funerals of at least 203 Floridians, despite having absolutely no connection to the hurricanes that hit Florida in 2004. Ten people weren’t even in Florida when they died.
Now, if that’s not dysfunctional, I don’t know what is. However, as Kevin Spacey is told in American Beauty, “Never underestimate the power of denial.” Michael Brown is absolutely convinced he did nothing wrong in his management of the Katrina efforts. He keeps it up, he might even convince himself he’s Jesus. Then we can see him climb up on a cross for real, instead of metaphorically as he testifies before Congress.
