Call it the year of lame excuses

Alex Johnson Reporter • Profile

“I don’t think anybody anticipated the breach of the levees,” President Bush said on Sept. 1, three days after Hurricane Katrina punctured the system of dams protecting New Orleans and created the greatest natural disaster in American history.

Unfortunately for the president, that wasn’t true, as news reports about studies that did just that would make clear. But it sounded good at the time.

“I remember on Tuesday morning picking up newspapers and I saw headlines, ‘New Orleans Dodged the Bullet,’” Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff said three days later, explaining why his department was slow to respond to the devastation. “Because, if you recall, the storm moved to the east and then continued on and appeared to pass with considerable damage but nothing worse.”

Of course, it didn’t. And even if it had, that would only have meant that the bullet took out Mississippi and Alabama, rather than Louisiana. But it sounded good at the time.

That was 2005. It was the year of the excuse.

‘Brownie, you’re doing a heck of a job’
Hurricane Katrina was the worst natural disaster in U.S. history. It killed 1,300 people, ravaged five states along the Gulf Coast and all but destroyed New Orleans. It also caused a political and bureaucratic storm of unprecedented proportions.

At the center of it was Michael Brown, director of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, who became a laughingstock after he betrayed his agency’s lack of planning before Katrina and its lack of awareness afterward. Brown told CNN that he didn’t even learn that   hundreds of New Orleanians were trapped in the fetid Convention Center until two days after the television networks had been broadcasting the scene to the world.

Excuses, excuses It wasn’t just Katrina that turned folks’ mouths mealy: — “We did trust Andy Fastow and sadly — tragically — that trust turned out to be fatally misplaced.” — Enron Corp. founder and former CEO Kenneth L. Lay — “Well, I mean, (the photos) were for psy-op reasons. And the reasons worked.” — Pfc. Lynndie England, justifying pictures of her shackling and mocking detainees in Iraq. — “I was misinterpreted by the AP, but that happens all the time.” — the Rev. Pat Robertson, after he was criticized for saying of Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez: “You know, I don’t know about this doctrine of assassination, but if he thinks we’re trying to assassinate him, I think that we really ought to go ahead and do it. It’s a whole lot cheaper than starting a war.” — “Although I do not know how this substance came into my body, it is possible that a shot of vitamin B12 I took sometime in April might have been the cause. ... I have never intentionally used a banned substance, but I unfortunately wasn’t careful enough.” — baseball star Rafael Palmeiro, who previously had testified that he had never used anabolic steroids, after he was suspended for using an anabolic steroid. — “We firmly believe that Mr. McCormick was the victim of fraud.” — Savvis Communications, after its CEO, Robert McCormick, ran up $241,000 in American Express charges at a strip club.

Instead, e-mail records showed, Brown and his staff were hard at work making sure he had enough time for a leisurely dinner in Baton Rouge and looked snappy on TV. “I got (my shirt) at Nordsstroms (sic),” Brown wrote. “Are you proud of me? Can I quit now? Can I go home?”

Katrina gave plenty of folks opportunities galore to step into big, steaming piles of rhetoric:

“Brownie, you’re doing a heck of a job,” the president said at a post-disaster photo-op, hard on the heels of pictures of the chief executive reviewing hurricane-ravaged areas from the comfort of Air Force One while returning from  vacation.

The president’s mother placed foot firmly in mouth when she said this of the thousands of Louisianans who took refuge in Houston’s Astrodome: “So many of the people in the arena here, you know, were underprivileged anyway, so this is working very well for them.”

And Rep. Richard Baker, R-La., was overheard telling lobbyists: “We finally cleaned up public housing in New Orleans. We couldn’t do it, but God did.”

It sounded good at the time
Fifteen years after she collapsed in a coma and seven years after various members of her family began fighting in court over what to do with her, Terri Schiavo died in a hospice in Pinellas Park, Fla., in March. The battle over which relatives should have the final say in whether to remove her feeding tube turned into a proxy for the abortion wars as figures from Florida Gov. Jeb Bush to the Rev. Jesse Jackson weighed in on the meaning of life.

Quotation: “This is not somebody in a persistent vegetative state,” Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist, R-Tenn., a physician, diagnosed in Washington after watching Schiavo on videotape. Turns out she was, as her autopsy revealed.

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