Michael Brown, the now-infamous FEMA director during Hurricane Katrina, got a warm welcome on Fox News Friday to discuss his op-ed advising the Trump administration about how to respond to Hurricane Harvey.
Also on Friday, Jarvis DeBerry, the deputy opinions editor for the New Orleans Times-Picayune, published a scathing column about Brown called, “Media, please stop asking Michael Brown about storm preparedness.”
DeBerry wrote:
When Hurricane Katrina made its Louisiana landfall, Brown was the epitome of unpreparedness and indifference. He was dawdling in Baton Rouge as New Orleans was drowning. Actually, he was doing more than dawdling. He was preening. At the height of our crisis, when an employee told him that he had looked on television, Brown quickly responded that he'd been shopping at Nordstrom's. "Are you proud of me?"
DeBerry also blasted Brown for trying to shift blame for the Katrina catastrophe to Mayor Ray Nagin and falsely accusing him of not calling for an evacuation.
So not only should Brown be disqualified from talking about hurricane preparedness because he was an incompetent head of FEMA, but he should also be disqualified from talking about hurricane preparedness because he has continued to lie about what happened in 2005.
But not only did host Neil Cavuto ignore such criticism from a guy who has firsthand knowledge of the consequences of Brown’s incompetence, Cavuto seemed determined to help polish Brown’s reputation.
At the end of the interview, Cavuto tried to shift blame for Katrina away from Brown and onto the mayor and other local officials. "You did nothing wrong, and I covered it very, very closely,” Cavuto reassured Brown. “I can distinctly remember, fighting governor, fighting mayor, then rival governors in other states and Mississippi, Haley Barbour at the time. It was a vicious back and forth and you were, I guess, monkey in the middle."
"I want to give you your due,” Cavuto said.
Watch Cavuto use Hurricane Harvey to help rehabilitate Brown’s image below, from the August 25, 2017 Your World.
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