On Wednesday, I commented that Tim Russert owed his Meet the Press audience a clarification regarding Aaron Broussard's dramatic fictional story-telling.
I got my wish. Well, not really, but the president of Jefferson Parish in New Orleans was Russert's guest this morning.
Broussard was reduced to tears--again!
This time it was momentary and he didn't sob or lower his head. He didn't really stretch as an actor. I have to give him a thumbs down on his performance. Nevertheless, Broussard was entertaining.
Russert ran the footage of Broussard's emotional collapse on the September 4 show, including Broussard saying:
"Are you coming, son? Is somebody coming?" And he said, "Yeah, Mama, somebody's coming to get you. Somebody's coming to get you on Tuesday. Somebody's coming to get you on Wednesday. Somebody's coming to get you on Thursday. Somebody's coming to get you on Friday." And she drowned Friday night. She drowned Friday night.
Broussard was only able to hear the audio, but he got choked up upon listening.
Transcript
(Excerpt)
(End videotape)
Mr. Broussard: I've never watched this. Why are they taking me here?
Mr. Russert: Mr. Broussard, obviously that was a very painful, emotional moment, but let me show you some of the...
Mr. Broussard: Sir, I've never looked at that. I've never heard that. I'm sorry. You take me to a sad place when you let me hear that.
Mr. Russert: Well, it was important, I think...
Mr. Broussard: Go ahead. Go ahead, sir. Go ahead, sir.
Mr. Russert: Thank you very much.
Mr. Broussard: Go ahead.
Mr. Russert: All right, sir. Thank you very much. Take your time. But it's important I think...
Mr. Broussard: Go ahead.
Mr. Russert: ...that our viewers see that again because MSNBC and other blog organizations have looked into the facts behind your comments and these are the conclusions, and I'll read it for you and our viewers. It says: "An emotional moment and a misunderstanding. Since the broadcast of [Meet the Press] interview...a number of bloggers have questioned the validity of Broussard's story.
Did Broussard retract his false characterization of events regarding the death of Thomas Rodrigue's mother?
NOOOOOOOO.
He reiterated it!
Mr. Broussard: Sir, this gentleman's mother died on that Friday before I came on the show. My own staff came up to me and said what had happened. I had no idea his mother was in the nursing home. It was related to me by my own staff, who had tears in their eyes, what had happened. That's what they told me. I went to that man, who I love very much and respect very much, and he had collapsed like a deck of cards. And I took him and put him in my hospital room with my prayer books and told him to sit there and cry out and pray away and give honor to his mother with his tears and his prayers.
Now, everything that was told to me about the preface of that was told to me by my own employees. Do you think I would interrogate a man whose mother just died and said, "Tommy, I want to know everything about why your mother just died"? The staff, his own staff, told me those words. Sir, that woman is the epitome of abandonment. She was left in that nursing home. She died in that nursing home. Tommy will tell you that he tried to rescue her and could not get her rescued. Tommy could tell you that he sent messages there through the EOC and through, I think, the sheriff's department, "Tell Mama everything's going to be OK. Tell Mama we're coming to get her."
Listen, sir, somebody wants to nitpick a man's tragic loss of a mother because she was abandoned in a nursing home? Are you kidding? What kind of sick mind, what kind of black-hearted people want to nitpick a man's mother's death? They just buried Eva last week. I was there at the wake. Are you kidding me? That wasn't a box of Cheerios they buried last week. That was a man's mother whose story, if it is entirely broadcast, will be the epitome of abandonment. It will be the saddest tale you ever heard, a man who was responsible for safekeeping of a half a million people, mother's died in the next parish because she was abandoned there and he can't get to her and he tried to get to her through EOC. He tried to get through the sheriff's office. He tries every way he can to get there. Somebody wants to debate those things? My God, what sick-minded person wants to do that?
What kind of agenda is going on here? Mother Nature doesn't have a political party. Mother Nature can vote a person dead and Mother Nature can vote a community out of existence. But Mother Nature is not playing any political games here. Somebody better wake up. You want to come and live in this community and see the tragedy we're living in? Are you sitting there having your coffee, you're in a place where toilets flush and lights go on and everything's a dream and you pick up your paper and you want to battle ideology and political chess games? Man, get out of my face. Whoever wants to do that, get out of my face.
When Broussard again claimed that Rodrique's mother died on September 2, did Russert press him on it?
NOOOOOOOO.
Maybe Russert was frightened off by Broussard's anger. Maybe it was too much for Tim to hear him loudly say in a threatening voice packed with emotion, "GET OUT OF MY FACE."
Broussard was not in the studio with Russert, so that doesn't seem plausible. I guess it was Russert's anti-Bush agenda that kept him from following up. Yeah, that must be it.
Mr. Russert: Mr. Broussard, the people who are questioning your comments are saying that you accused the federal government and the bureaucracy of murder, specifically calling on the secretary of Homeland Security and using this as an example to denounce the federal government. And what they're saying is, in fact, it was the local government that did not evacuate Eva Rodrigue on Friday or on Saturday.
Stop!
The "people who are questioning your comments"?
Isn't Russert questioning Broussard's comments?
Rodrigue questioned Broussard's comments!
From MSNBC's own account:
When told of the sequence of phone calls that Broussard described on Meet the Press, Rodrigue said “No, no, that’s not true.”
What Broussard said on September 4 was acknowledged as FALSE by Rodrigue himself!
Officials say that his mother was among the thirty-four people who died on August 29 at St. Rita's Nursing Home in St. Bernard Parish, near New Orleans.
This isn't an issue of being "black-hearted" or "sick-minded" or having a political agenda. It's about facts, very simple facts, facts which Broussard refuses to admit. Russert, apparently, also prefers Broussard's timeline to reality.
Mr. Broussard: Sir, with everything I said on Meet the Press, the last punctuation of my statements were the story that I was going to tell in about maybe two sentences. It just got emotional for me, sir. Talk about the context of everything I said. Were we abandoned by the federal government? Absolutely we were. Were there more people that abandoned us? Make the list. The list can go on for miles. That's for history to document. That's what Congress does best, burn witches. Let Congress do their hearings. Let them find the witches. Let them burn them. The media burns witches better than anybody. Let the media go find the witches and burn them. But as I stood on the ground, sir, for day after day after day after day, nobody came here, sir. Nobody came. The federal government didn't come. The Red Cross didn't come. I'll give you a list of people that didn't come here, sir, and I was here.
So anybody that's saying, "Oh, they were all here," you know, they weren't living on my planet, there weren't living in my parish. They did not come. I can't make it any more clearer than that. Did inefficiencies, did bureaucracy commit murder here? Absolutely, it did. And Congress and the media will flush it out and find it out and those people will be held accountable. You've already given an example. These people in the nursing home in St. Bernard, they're getting indicted. Good. They ought to be indicted. They ought to get good old-fashioned Western justice. They ought to be taken out and administered to like they did in the old West.
Yes, there's a lot of people that they're going to find that are going to be villains in this situation, but they're also going to find for the most part that the Peter Principle was squared. The Peter Principle is you promote somebody to the level of incompetency, but when you promote somebody to the level of incompetency in a life or death department, then those people should be ousted. Those people should be strung up. Those people should be burned at the stake. And I'm sure Congress and the press is going to do that.
Mr. Russert: At the local, state and federal level.
Mr. Broussard: Sir, at every level. Are you kidding? This is a jigsaw puzzle. This is a mosaic. The blame will be shared by everybody. The heroic deeds will be magnified as individual stories of heroics come out from different people and agencies that did eventually come here. Sir, this is chaos. It's organized chaos at best. There are plenty of heroes that have to be uncovered. There are plenty of villains that have to be uncovered. Let the process go on. Let it happen. I don't have time to do it, sir. I didn't even watch my own broadcast that you played to me in my ear. It pained me to hear that again because Tommy Rodrigue is a friend of mine. He works for me. I was at his mother's wake.
When somebody wants to nit-pick these details, I don't know what sick minds creates this black-hearted agenda, but it's sick. I mean, let us recover. Let us rebuild. If somebody wants me to debate them on national TV, hey, buddy, be my guest. Make my day. Put me at a podium when I got a full night's sleep and you will not like matching me against anybody that you want. That person is going to be in trouble. If this station or anybody else or any other station wants to do that, you just give me a full night's sleep, sir. I haven't had one in about 30 days. But you wind me up with a full night's sleep, I'll debate every detail of everything you want, sir.
Mr. Russert: Aaron Broussard, the president of Jefferson Parish, Louisiana, we thank you for coming on and correcting the record and putting it in context. And we wish you well and to all your people in the recovery. And we hope to talk to you again.
"Burning witches."
Yikes!
Broussard is a real piece of work.
I found Russert's final remarks to be laugh out loud funny.
"[W]e thank you for coming on and correcting the record and putting it in context."
THAT DIDN'T HAPPEN!
In effect, rather than clarifying or retracting, the segment gave Broussard a Meet the Press platform once again to lose control and spread falsehoods.
At this point, I am compelled to call on Russert to give his audience a clarification on Broussard's non-clarification. I'm not holding my breath on that.
After Broussard, the audience was treated to a panel of New York Times columnists--David Brooks, Maureen Dowd, and Tom Friedman.
Naturally, hilarity ensued.
Mr. Russert: ...Maureen Dowd, yesterday in The New York Times you wrote, "What Katrina exposed was a president who--remarkable as this may sound--seemed bored after his reelection... The more tuned-in W. is now, the more obvious it is that he tuned out as New Orleans drowned. There's a high cost for presidential learning curves."
Bored?
Ms. Maureen Dowd: Well, I think it's hard for any of your viewers to believe that a president could get bored because what could be more fun than picking up the phone, calling the 82nd Airborne and saving a bunch of American lives? But this happened to Clinton right after his re-election. The Times had a front-page story with Senator Breaux and others quoted as saying, "He's drifting. He's lost his way." He was playing golf at night in storms. And Monica, the chaos of Monica then caused him to focus. Unfortunately it was on impeachment. But a lot of people who cover Bush think he was bored. He was exercising on the mountain bike under his iPod, listening to "My Sharona." You know, his aides did not have the nerve to tell him to cut his vacation short even after Katrina started.
Mr. Russert: A stark contrast to the government reaction for Rita as opposed to Katrina.
Ms. Dowd: Right. Well, as one Republican said this week, "Now, we've got a president who's the head of FEMA," you know, which is not where they want to be, either. He has inverse ADD. Now, he can only pay attention to one thing.
Later, Dowd continued to bash Bush.
She was playing her dominatrix roll to the hilt, cracking the whip as her dye-damaged red hair hung over her right eye like an eyepatch.
Ms. Dowd: ...I think that, you know, for the Democrats, the problem is that Katrina exposed the incompetence of Iraq and Americans were able to see them on a split screen and the same exact problems existed. They were warned by experts before they went in. They blew it off. They failed to send enough troops early enough to stop the law and order and chaos problems. Then they gave all the no-bid contracts to Halliburton and staffed everything with incompetent Bush loyalists and cronies. So the public can see that this administration has always been incompetent, but the Democrats aren't in a position to take advantage of it because they went along with Bush on authorizing a war based on false premises.
HALLIBURTON. HALLIBURTON. HALLIBURTON.
That is Dowd's problem and the Democrats' problem.
Simply saying "Halliburton" is not going to cut it. They have to come up with some substance. Something. ANYTHING.
Hatred for Bush and his administration is NOT an agenda for America.
A funny line I heard while channel surfing--
On ABC's This Week, George Will said that Bush was looking for a "Hispanic woman from New Orleans" to fill Sandra Day O'Connor's Supreme Court seat.
I doubt even someone with those "qualifications" would satisfy the rabid Dems.
Enough of this. Time for football!
Packers lose in a heartbreaker.
______________________________
I retract my earlier comments about Blogspot. It was not a system problem. It was my problem, completely my fault. I apologize.
Please forgive me, Blogger Support.
(Thank you, Wordsmith from Nantucket for your kind words.)
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