8-29-25 - 8am - New Orleans History with Hurricanes and Dinner

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
I saw the mayor in New Orleans just got indicted
wire fraud and conspiracy. Imagine that New Orleans mayor getting
charged with wirefraud conspiracy. What are the odds.

Speaker 2 (00:16):
I'm getting derailed here? And and that's fine and not
necessarily the talk back, but I was. I was derailed
anyway because behind the scenes, my daughter in law's father
has just passed away, and everybody's trying to figure out

(00:39):
the logistics of while parents, son and daughter in law
go down to help taking care of the grandkids. But
Tammer's already in at the end dis closed location, and
so the grandkids aren't really going down until'll, you know,
they keep them out of the way while they do
all the arrangements and all that that sort of stuff.

(01:01):
And I'm trying to do that, and then I come
in here and I sit down and read the text messages,
and so everything I was going to do this hour
it just kind of went out the window, because I
do want to address the text messages, because as I said,
I did not do and am not going to do

(01:21):
any interviews. And Dragon had a good point. Anybody asked
me today about interviews, I just have hey, go listen
to the.

Speaker 3 (01:27):
Podcast twitch you can find at Michael says, go here
dot com.

Speaker 2 (01:35):
Our friend, our friend in Alaska sent a text message Michael,
no jokes this time. Did you write an op ed somewhere?
I thought I heard that at the end but missed it.
If you mentioned it, Oh, I see you? Did you reply?

Speaker 3 (01:50):
I did reply. I did find the op ed. I
did post it too, Michael says, go here.

Speaker 2 (01:56):
Okay, thank you, all right, so you can go read
it for yourself. But then something that Dragon and I
talked about this morning. But then escape my brain because
it's just overloaded. Guber number nineteen seventy, writes Mike. I'm
just tuning in, tuning in. Can you speak about how

(02:18):
the local government would purposely flood the ninth Ward and
not the business district? Wow? Now that is a loaded
question which requires a lot of nuance. So let's go
back in now, let's don't go back in history yet.

(02:39):
One of the most irritating things to me about the
katrine and narrative that got established by the media and
many locals was, remember when I think it was Mike
Myers and Kanye was it Kanye Kanye West?

Speaker 3 (02:59):
Kanye, you don't care about black people.

Speaker 2 (03:01):
Yeah, George Bush hates black people. Well, that didn't sit
well with any of us, because that's that's just fundamentally false.
Then the rumor became, and I honestly never quite understood
if there was ever any legitimate genesis to the idea

(03:23):
that somehow that Michael Brown and George Bush or the
federal government. I mean, you've got to be a real
conspiracy theorist to believe this that somehow, during the midst
of all that chaos, we had pre planned to simultaneously

(03:44):
blow up the Seventeenth Street Canal. I forget the name
of another canal.

Speaker 3 (03:51):
It's time to come clean. Michael. You were back there
with almost acme plungers ready to go. Wait wait, wait,
wait for it, wait for it, or hurricane's gone. Everybody's
threat boom.

Speaker 2 (04:00):
So the Seventeenth Street Canal, some of the levees along
the Mississippi, that they were purposely blown up because we
wanted to kill black people. Now that is absurd on
its face, but over the past twenty years and in

(04:23):
it was in the Netflix documentary Right Betsy. Hurricane Betsy
hit New Orleans in nineteen sixty five and nineteen sixty five,
there were some levees. I mean, they weren't nearly as

(04:44):
extensive as they are today. I shouldn't say it. They
were not nearly as extensive extensive as they were twenty
years ago. But many people would retell stories about when
the levees would break. Now, there's a difference between a
levee breaching and a levee being topped. If a levee

(05:10):
can remain functional, but the water becomes so high that
the water goes over the top. While that's a serious issue,
that's not a catastrophic issue because eventually the water on
the water side of the levee will drop to below

(05:34):
the top level of the levee and the flooding will stop. However,
if a levee breeches, you have a hole in the levee.
Some of these holes were huge blocks long. Well, that
means that as the floodwaters move into Lake Poncha train
that then feed into the river or the river continues.

(05:58):
Think of all the floodwaters as they come down, Well,
think about Colorado. You have flash floods that come down
the Big Thompson, and those flood waters fill up the
Big Thompson and then it just keeps going until what
until the water reaches its maximum low level and begins

(06:20):
to level out or the floods in the mountains begin
to dissipate well, then eventually it stops. Well. The same
is true with a levee breach. As the water fills
into the Mississippi, it goes through that breach and it
will continue to flood, which is why you had twenty
feet of water or more in low lying areas such

(06:43):
as the ninth ward. Now let's think about the history
of New Orleans for a second. Why is downtown, why
is the central business district, and why is the French
Quarter historically usually not flooding well. Much like Indians when

(07:10):
they would set up camp in Colorado or Oklahoma or
anywhere else, you wouldn't necessarily set your camp up right
next to the river because you want to avoid the floods.
So as you would build your settlement, you would build
your settlement on higher ground to avoid any flash floods
that might occur in the mountains, or they might even

(07:31):
occur on the plains. You would find the highest level
to minimize to mitigate against the river overflowing its banks
and then flooding the settlement that you've built. That's what
happened in New Orleans when it was settled the French,
the Creole. Everybody found the highest ground and that's where
they settled. So the central business district, the French Quarter,

(07:57):
the tourist attraction, is a higher ground, so it's least
likely to flood. In fact, rarely does flood. If you
have flooding, its street flooding not not a big deal. Then,
as New Orleans grows, where is the cheapest place to

(08:17):
build if you're a poor, predominantly black person, The place
you can afford to build or the place you can
afford to buy happens to be in a flood zone.
So the lower ninth ward ninety nine black ends up
being in probably the worst possible geographic location in terms

(08:40):
of flooding. It's surrounded by levees to try to keep
it from being flooded. Now, some of the wealthy areas
are too, but predominantly to the lower ninth Ward that
gets all the focus. So when the levees breach, that
water just continues to flow in. Then somebody wrote, hang

(09:06):
on one second, because this was really good too, Google
number sixty sixty five thirty five. Michael, thank you for
the insight into managing Katrina. This has bugged me since then.
We saw video photos of people on the roofs that
something homes, waiting for boats and helicopters to rescue them

(09:27):
when they were just a couple blocks or less from
lower water or no water. This was after the storm calmed.
Why didn't they swim to safety? Did they generally not
know how to swim? Generally speaking, they did not know
how to swim. More broadly, though it's twenty feet of water,

(09:52):
it's twenty feet of water that has traveled through an
area that is full of alligators, poisonous snakes, industrial areas,
toxic chemicals, household chemicals, debris. I mean, when the floods

(10:12):
come through, the damage to homes. You can find easily
find video of an unimaginable debris in twenty feet of water.
Some people would they would try to swim from their
house because they thought the house across the street would
be a safer place to go, So they would try

(10:34):
to swim to even just across the street, and people
would lose their lives doing that, or they would start
trying to walk and then there would be debris coming down.
The debris would injure them, and now they become infected
or they become injured to the extent that they can't
keep moving anywhere and they would die. This is the

(10:57):
failure to understand and why I get so adamant about
their failure to implement their evacuation plan, particularly for people
who did not have the financial resources, the transportation, or
for that matter, even the physical ability to evacuate themselves.

(11:20):
Their evacuation. The New Orleans Evacuation Plan and the Louisiana
Evacuation Plan called for buses to not just school buses,
but also they're similar to our RTD, you know, the
public transportation buses to drive through the neighborhoods picking up
people to take them out of the city. But they

(11:42):
didn't do that. They didn't have the drivers. The school,
you know, the school didn't provide drivers. They didn't have drivers.
There were nobody to do it. And practically speaking, swimming
was not an option because of the debris, the toxic
nature of the water, everything. I mean, there were fires
burning everywhere because gas lines would break. It was just

(12:05):
it was catastrophy. It was truely catastrophe. But then here's
the history that people don't understand, which he gets back
to Bush hates black people, or this is a way
to clear out the Lower ninth Ward when Betsy hit
in nineteen sixty five. There are old folks that or

(12:30):
there are they're now old folks, and they were young
folks at the time who heard who claimed they heard
booms as if they were explosions. Anytime there's a mass flood,
you can have substations that get flooded, transformers that get

(12:52):
knocked over, and power lines would start to drop. And
if you've ever heard a transformer blow, it's a big boom.
And even with the levy breeches, you might hear a sound.
I don't think it would be a boom, but you'll
hear a sound like something something's wrong, and then you'll

(13:12):
hear the rush of water.

Speaker 3 (13:13):
Well, in a big, massive slab of concrete breaks, I
don't think it's going to be silent.

Speaker 2 (13:18):
Yeah, that's not going to be silent either. So what
happened in nineteen sixty five was the rumor started that
this was a way for city officials and politicians to
literally clear out the Lower ninth Ward, and that became
sort of the tradition that became the narrative that black

(13:45):
people that lived in the Lower ninth Ward. Some would
not everybody, but some would believe it that in nineteen
sixty five, somebody, you know that, whoever it is, that
someone blew up the levees to clear out the Lower
ninth Ward because they knew it was dangerous. And so

(14:08):
you fast forward to two thousand and five, Oh, now
we're going to play the race card and Brown and
Bush blew up the levees because now we're going to
try to replicate what they tried to do in nineteen
sixty five. Utterly absurd, no basis in fact whatsoever. But
for people who lived in nineteen sixty five, and those

(14:29):
stories get handed down, that becomes a legacy that they
actually believe that, Yes, politicians, you know, white racist politicians
in the Deep South, wanted to blow up the levees
and clear that out so that they could redevelop it.
It's utter insanity. It's absolutely utter insanity. Now what I

(14:55):
find fascinating is there's some Yahoo I'd never heard of
them before. You have nothing to do with Katrina in
as far as we were concerned of responding or trying
to recover who was some professor at LSU some climate activists.
Did you notice the General Honorey in the Netflix thing
has has said at the end that he thought that
climate change was indeed the existential threat that young people

(15:18):
have to deal with today.

Speaker 3 (15:20):
I must have missed that from him on that Some
of the stuff he said was just ridiculous.

Speaker 2 (15:24):
Anyway, That's where I backed it up and listened to
it again because I was so astonished that, yeah, the General,
Now the General's gone full bore, you know, member of
the Church of the climate activists, that that's the existential
threat that young people have to face today.

Speaker 3 (15:38):
The best part, since we're talking about the General, it
was when they're like, did you did you wait for
orders to go to General Orleans?

Speaker 4 (15:47):
No?

Speaker 3 (15:47):
I just went Were you afraid of court martial? No?
You don't get court martial when you do the right thing.

Speaker 2 (15:53):
I to fine tune that. The way I interpreted what
he said was I didn't wait for orders. I left
before anybody even asked me to go there, which really Bush. Yeah, yeah,

(16:14):
And he's also quoted as saying, as a reporter asks him,
why did it take you so long to get here,
rather than tell the truth that well, I didn't get
any orders to come here because Rumsfeld, my boss in
the Pentagon, was delaying things. He said, well, how long
did it take? He turned to the He turned the
question on the reporter, which I don't love a problem

(16:35):
with because it actually made a good point. How long
did it take you to get here? And the reporter
responds to some effect that it took me a long
time because it was it was really difficult to get,
you know, across the to get across make poncha train,
it was really difficult to get here. Well, no fee, sherlock,
because power lines are down, roads or damage bridges are out.
You know the Interstate Highway that comes across Poncha train.

(16:59):
There complete slabs of those completely gone, disappeared. It was
it was you couldn't traverse it whatsoever. All of that
feeds into all of these narratives that get established, and
then somehow, with all the background they gave you in
the last segment, plus what I've just given you here,

(17:22):
then everybody wants to claim that somehow that everything gets
piled on me, when, as I tried to point out
on the op ed, yes there were I said some
stupid things. And you know, let me tell you if
I told you a story about going to dinner. That's
a big bugaboo with everybody. Let me tell you about

(17:44):
that one.

Speaker 3 (17:46):
Dragon. Sounds like it could be a good time for
led Zeppelin song. Yeah, levies to saying, never heard of it?

Speaker 2 (17:57):
Maybe, well maybe maybe you can find it down on
the third floor somewhere in the in the in the library.

Speaker 3 (18:04):
Are there a new band some yeah, new ways.

Speaker 2 (18:06):
Yeah, they're a new band. It's l E A d
Z E P L I N led Zeppelin. Got okay,
led Zeppelin.

Speaker 3 (18:15):
I'll search it out.

Speaker 2 (18:15):
Some people think it's lead Zeppelin, but it's actually led Zeppelin.
I hesitate to even say this because this is how
uh there's a text message. You've a number four zero
eight three Michael im possibly Dragon? Can I get permission
to play a snippet of how you look at articles

(18:38):
for my English thirteen oh one class. I'm teaching bias
and accuracy, and your segment on that was fantastic. You
can use all of it, but whatever you want to use,
it's out. There's a podcast. You can replay it all
you want to. You can use the editorial, you can
use whatever I'm saying, but I would add this to it.

(19:03):
Because I want you to understand the and this is
not just me, this is anybody that's somehow a focal
point for the media. While I don't ever hesitate to

(19:24):
say what I actually believe, i'd be lying to you
if I didn't stop and think, oh, is this going
If this is heard by X or Y or whatever
it might be, is that going to create backlash? And
the only reason I asked myself the question is because
I don't get blindsided. I want to be ready for it.

(19:50):
Here's what I want to say that for some people
will be interpreted as taking advantage of death and destruction,
which I find fascinating. In two thousand and eleven, it
was six or seven years, I think around two thousand
and nine. You think i'd know, but I don't remember

(20:11):
for sure. I wrote a book because i'd been through
all the congressional hearings, I had been through all of
the media tolenoscopy, and had decided they're still missing a point.
They're still missing a lot of the things that they
don't understand, including the dinner, which I'll mention in just
a second. So I wrote a book available on Amazon,

(20:37):
Deadly Indifference, The Perfect Parentheses, Political Storm, Hurricane Katrina, the
Bush administration, and it's my take on what was going on.
And the thing that I did in that book was
I had a co author, a great writer who helped

(20:58):
me get through the book. And it was kind of
interesting because the publisher wanted me to use him as
a ghost writer, and I was like, no, I'm not
going to do that. If he's going to help me
write the book, then he's going to get credit for it.
He has, so he is a co author of the

(21:21):
book because he did. He helped me write the book.
But one thing that I told him was absolutely a
non starter for me was to not put in the
book supporting materials, copies of emails, references to testimony, whatever
it was, so that if people question, well, then you

(21:44):
can go look for yourself. You can go find it yourself.
Which gets to the story about me having dinner. I
don't know when it was, but it was post landfall.
Everything's going going on. The former director of FEMA, who

(22:04):
happened to be a friend of mine, the former director
of who he was Bush's campaign manager, as a matter
of fact, was working for a contractor. He wasn't there
for that purpose, but he was well he was in
Louisiana for that contractor, but we didn't go to dinner
because of that. We went to dinner because he was

(22:26):
a friend of mine and he knew what it was like,
and he was like, let me take you out to dinner.
You need a break. So he and I in Baton
Rouge where I was basing my operations, and I needed
to base my operations there because unlike Honorey. Let me
make something very clear about General Honorey, he had a

(22:47):
very narrow although significant, Don't get me wrong, it was significant.
He had a very narrow area, geographic area of responsibility.
His in military terms, his area of operations was New Orleans,
and I would even narrow it down to even less

(23:07):
than New Orleans. It was pretty much Louis Armstrong International Airport, downtown,
the Convention Center in the lower ninth ward. I had
the responsibility because the presidential disaster covered Texas where we
were sending people, Mississippi, Alabama, Florida where it originally struck,

(23:32):
and then all of those states where we started sending people,
including Colorado. So I had almost half the nation under
my jurisdiction during that time. So I decided it makes
sense for me to be in Baton Rouge, where I
have an operational airport. So if I need to take
the Gulf Strain to get from here to go to Biloxi,

(23:54):
or I need to go from here to Houston or wherever,
I can do that and I don't have to take
a helicopter in I can operate more efficiently out of
Baton Rouge. So my friend is in Baton Rouge and
he says, come on, let me take you out to dinner.
So we go. We go to dinner. I tell the
staff I'm gonna go have dinner. That's all I tell them.
I'm gonna go have dinner. I still have my I
got my I think we got rid of our blackberries.

(24:17):
By that time, I had my cell phone, had my
satellite phone, had a pager, and they knew exactly where
I was going. And most importantly, I had a security
My security detail was still with me, so if someone
needed me, there were at least a half dozen ways

(24:39):
to get a hold of me. So we go to
a restaurant in Baton Rouge. I walk in some it
was not Ruth's Chris. I have no idea what it was.
I couldn't tell you what I had for dinner. I
don't even know where the restaurant was or the name
of it.

Speaker 3 (24:55):
Do you know what you had for dinner last night? I?

Speaker 2 (24:58):
Uh, I do you remember last night? Because I took
I went to dinner after I picked the dogs up
at the dry cleaners and then went to dinner. So yeah,
I do remember last night night before. I don't know,
I just I have stop and think about it.

Speaker 3 (25:09):
Water crackers and probably out.

Speaker 2 (25:11):
Water crackers and peanut butter and jelly. But twenty years ago,
no idea. So anyway, I'm in full communication. I've got
my security detail with me and everything. We walk into
this restaurant and we're walking, you know, the hoster, hostess
or whoever it was, just taking us to a table.
The people in the restaurant recognize me and they stand

(25:33):
up and they clap. I'm shocked because I'm feeling like
completely eviscerated at that point. But the restaurant stands up
and claps. So we sit down, we have a short,
quick dinner, and they go back to work. Unbeknownst to me,
my press secretary in response to an email from somebody

(25:59):
I don't know who it was. I don't remember. I
can find out. I could go look, but as I
sit here, I don't remember said something to the effect
he can't be bothered right now. He's at dinner. He
needs some time to eat. Holy crap, if you don't
think that that caused a fece storm. Unbeknownst to me,

(26:23):
I'm having a club sandwich and some fries and a
diet coke or something in a restaurant in Baton Rouge,
and all this crap is blowing up around me, and
I go back. I find out what she's done a fire.
I fired her, fired her and called Scooter Libby, the

(26:46):
Vice president's chief staff. And because my previous press secretary
had gotten recruited by Cheney to go work for him,
so I said, Scooter, I just fired my press secretary.
At can I get Leam back? And he said, sure,
she'll be on a plane. She'll be down there first

(27:06):
thing in the morning. But the narrative became that I
was too busy having dinner to be bothered. No, I
had my cell phone, I had the satphone, I had
my security detail. Anybody could reach me in anytime. The
President of the United States could have called me from

(27:30):
Crawford Camp. David the East Wing, the situation room, Air
Force one Marine one, and he would have been bingo
right to me as I sat there chewing on a
club sandwich or whatever the hell I was chewing on.
But oh no, that wasn't the median narrative. The media
narrative was I was too damn busy eating why, because

(27:51):
that's what somebody that I didn't know had sent sent
an email out. If she had come to me and said, hey,
somebody needs to talk to you, I would have taken
the phone call. But she was trying to be helpful,
and I understand she was trying to be helpful, but
she was naive and stupid in doing so, and I
had no choice. I didn't think I have a choice

(28:13):
but to fire because I could not have that kind
of interaction with the media. So she went back to DC.

Speaker 4 (28:23):
Michael, I know they scapegoaded you during Katrina. That was
pretty obvious. So I think you did a good job
the best you could under the situation. But when they
blamed you for Jackson not building those retaining walls high
enough when the British were coming, I do hold you accountable.

Speaker 2 (28:44):
Yeah, and I take full responsibility for that. Let's go
back to the dinner example, for a moment, take out
the email that got published and the New York Times
started that narrative about you know, I was too busy.

(29:08):
I mean, the assumption is I told her the press secretary,
to tell everyone I was too busy having dinner to
deal with whatever reporter it was that wanted to reach me. Well,
set that aside for a moment. If I mean, there
are a lot of things I would have done differently,
but I think that's an example of something I would

(29:30):
have done differently, not because it would have had a
substance substantive difference, but simply because of the opties. Even
if it's like, you know, if a tree falls in
the woods and nobody's there to hear, it doesn't really
make a sound. If nobody had ever known that I'd

(29:51):
gone to dinner, would it have made a difference in
on the all the ongoing operations, because what am I doing.
I'm at the head, I'm at the top of the pyramid,
just trying to make sure that everybody's doing what they're
supposed to be doing, and I'm going to eat somewhere sometime. Anyway,
in hindsight, I would have never gone to dinner. I

(30:12):
would have just said to Joe, let's just order something
in I'll have a stat I'll have my personal assistant
go out and find something and bring this thinging back
and we can eat here in the office. But think
about how absurd that is. Because the the greater point,

(30:35):
particularly to the person that's listening at, wants to use
this in a class, that narrative gets established, and nobody
unless you delve into it. And I'm not saying that
everybody should delve into it, but unless you delve into
all of the background of that and read about that

(30:55):
in the book or in congressional testimony or anywhere else,
the narrative is I was too busy eating to be
bothered with anything going on, because it's something that I
didn't do that a press secretary did. Probably I had
no idea what I ate, probably wasn't all that good,

(31:15):
And thinking of all the crap I've had to put
up with, Yeah, wouldn't have gone to dinner for sure.
For sure,