This is unbelievable Brown: You want me to be a hero

“My mistake was in recognizing that for whatever reasons … Mayor Nagin and Governor Blanco were reticent to order a mandatory evacuation,” he said.

“If I, Mike Brown, individual, could have done something to convince them that this was the big one and they needed to order a mandatory evacuation, I would have done it.”

This is unbelievable. The depths to which this rovian administration will sink are incredible. Here we have the first shot across the bow in the Blame War (this ain’t no game folks) from the very people who spend the last month chanting “we don’t want to get into the blame game” over and over again.

I’ve got news for Brownie, it isn’t about what happened in Louisiana before the hurricane hit, or in Mississippi or Alabama either (whose evacuations were not all that different from New Orlean’s or even Houston’s during the Rita scare), it is about what happened afterwards. When local infrastructure was destroyed, local communications rendered useless, roads unpassable and a massive dislocation of people and services it was the federal government’s job, made all nice and legal and legitimate ahead of time by the various declarations of emergency at all levels, to step up and respond to the disaster.

And no matter how you spin it Brownie, (or Karl Rove, who is writing the script here), you can’t avoid the truth of that. For all the media’s anger during the disaster it will be interesting to see if it translates into holding these clown’s feet to the fire now that the lies are spinning. The fact is that both New Orleans, and the rest of southern Louisiana along with Mississippi and Alabama, pulled off a pretty amazing evacuation in a relatively short period of time. All the more amazing because until about 48 hours before landfall there were still predictions that it would track through the Florida panhandle. As Houston showed in Rita (touted by the wingnuts as “proof” republican governments are better than Democratic) it is virtually impossible to evacuate an entire area’s population, either in 2 days or 2 weeks, because some people just won’t leave. It amazes me that the pictures of the evacuation of Houston, which looked exactly like the pictures of the evacuation of New Orleans, are being touted as “getting it right” by the wingnuts while the New Orleans situation is being hammered, by Brownie and others, as being all wrong. The difference, for those who actually pay attention to these things, is that Houston didn’t get hit and New Orleans did. Those who stayed behind or couldn’t evacuate in Houston never became a story because they never had to pay the price the poor folks in New Orleans did.

Unfortunately I don’t hold out a lot of hope that the media has finally rediscovered reality and truth, certainly not if Tim Russert’s behavior on Sunday is any indication. Arianna doesn’t really slam him enough in that piece either. I watched Russert go after Broussard (President of Jefferson Parish, LA) and saw Broussard call him out on it, time and time again. Russert was overmatched in that exchange, coming off like a mewling kitten in the face of Broussard’s angry tiger. Broussard time and again called out all those, obviously including Russert, who would nitpick petty details in the midst of crisis and then try to claim that focusing on minutiae somehow reveals the big picture. Broussard rightly pointed out that such efforts were cowardly and challenged Russert, and anyone else, to a one on one no-holds-barred debate on the matter “if you can promise me a good night’s sleep, I haven’t had one in the last 30 days”.

Broussard really made Russert look the fool he is and I wish Arianna had mentioned that more prominently.