History doesn’t always cooperate with us. The narrative that we are continually constructing often runs at odds with reality. Our outrage culture has built a story around Hurricane Katrina that’s pretty much the accepted narrative. One off-shoot of this narrative is that FEMA and its Director at the time, Michael Brown, were bumbling idiots who failed in every respect. In Dave Rubin’s interview with Brown on The Rubin Report, Brown offers a different side of Katrina. One interesting factoid that emerges is how Senator Mary Landrieu turned a Black Hawk helicopter around so that the U.S. taxpayer-financed helicopter–carrying Brown, Landrieu, and the Governor of Louisiana–could check on Landrieu’s fishing camp.
BROWN: It became clear to me probably within, well, it came clear to me the day after the storm made landfall. Because I was on a Black Hawk helicopter with former Senator Mary Landrieu and we were supposed to be going straight to the Superdome to meet with Mayor Nagin, who I always like to joke is–remind people he’s still in federal prison–and in I’m sitting there and I’m not I’m just kind of reading my notes from my staff and I look out the helicopter and I realize that we’re going the wrong direction across Lake Pontchartrain and I asked the pilot, “Where are you going?” and he said, “Well, the senator has asked that we go check her cabin before we go to the Superdome.” I was livid. So now I have a sitting United States Senator next to me who’s just overridden what I said we need to be doing and what the priorities are. I have the governor sitting next to her who doesn’t have the wherewithal to say to the senator, “You know what, your cabin is not our priority. The priority is the people of New Orleans.” It was at that moment that I realized that I had walked into a state that was so much more corrupt–I’ve been involved in politics since I was literally six years old–that it was just so corrupt and it was so dysfunctional that I knew that everything that I had in my hand about how things should operate were gonna start going out the window.
Mary’s brother, New Orleans Mayor Mitch Landrieu, says of this camp in his book In the Shadow of Statues: A White Southerner Confronts History:
In 1960, the year I was born, my grandmother Loretta Landrieu paid fifteen thousand dollars for a patch of land along Lake Pontchartrain, about thirty miles out from New Orleans, near the town of Slidell. That “camp,” which was a small house that looked like a triple-wide trailer, had a a long wooden pier that jutted out into the saltwater lake.
In other words, pretty much the opposite direction of New Orleans. Not to mention, Mary Landrieu barely lives in Louisiana, using her parents’ home as her address-of-record so that she can continue on with her job as Senator. That Black Hawk flight was no isolated incident. Landrieu just loves spending taxpayer money for travel, it seems.
- $3,200 in taxpayer money to fly 400 miles roundtrip from New Orleans to Lake Charles, LA
- Another time when she flew on Air Force One with President Obama to New Orleans.
- Then, of course, there was the over $30,000 in flights that she said she mistakenly charged to taxpayers.
In the Shadow of Statues: A White Southerner Confronts History, Mitch Landrieu
