Feb. 16, 2018 - Rubin Report - Dave Rubin
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| Again, I want to thank you all for, and Brownie, you're doing a heck of a job. | ||
| The FEMA director's working 24/7. | ||
| (audience applauding) | ||
| Joining me today is the former director of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, | ||
| better known as FEMA, as well as the host of the Michael Brown Radio Show. | ||
| Michael Brown, welcome to The Rubin Report. | ||
| Hey Dave, good to see you. | ||
| Good to be with you. | ||
| Yeah, thanks. | ||
| You know, this is the first time we've ever done this, where we played a 10 second clip. | ||
| Let me guess. | ||
| Do you have any idea what clip? | ||
| No, I can't even imagine what you might be talking about. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| I struggled with it for a little while because I thought, do I want to go right in and throw this right at him, sort of the infamous moment? | ||
| Or do we want to ease into it? | ||
| But then I thought, let's just get it out there. | ||
| Get it out there! | ||
| It is what it is. | ||
| It's a seminal moment in my life. | ||
| There's before that moment and after that moment. | ||
| Yeah, all right. | ||
| There are many, many reasons that I'm glad to be sitting here with you | ||
| because I think we're gonna get into so many of the things that we talk about on the show all the time | ||
| about the role of government and the difference between local government | ||
| and federal government, all of these agencies and red tape and all that. | ||
| But also that for that moment and what happened for the months | ||
| and probably years after that, and actually even when I was Googling you this morning, | ||
| all the 10-year anniversary people that were still pissed at you and all that stuff, | ||
| it has a lot to do with just sort of general outrage culture and blame culture and all of that. | ||
| So we're gonna do a lot here. | ||
| So first, let's just start with that moment, though, and then I wanna do everything else backwards. | ||
| Okay, just tell me a little bit about the days leading up to Hurricane Katrina. | ||
| 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 Blackhawk 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 I'm sitting there, and 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 head about how things should operate, we're gonna start going out the window. | ||
| Okay, I think that's actually a perfect story to now start with your childhood. | ||
| Let's just get a little bio out of you, because I think that's really interesting, and what led you to eventually be the director of FEMA, and then we'll go through everything else. | ||
| So just tell me a little bit about growing up. | ||
| Was your family political? | ||
| What sort of got you into this world? | ||
| You know, my family was kind of political when I think about it. | ||
| I mean, my mom is 86, 87 years old, and she still works for the election board. | ||
| She still does the little local elections in the little town that I grew up in. | ||
| I think you have to be over 80 to work at the election board. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| I think it is a requirement. | ||
| She's been doing it since she was in high school. | ||
| But when the first Republican governor of Oklahoma was running, he was the state party chairman, a guy by the name of Henry Bellman, was coming out to the | ||
| Oklahoma Panhandle. | ||
| And they recruited me at six years old to be the little kid to hand the push cards out | ||
| as he walked these rural streets of Oklahoma. | ||
| So I just grew up in this political family that was always involved. | ||
| And of course, you're involved in student council and, you know, in college and young | ||
| Republicans and all of that. | ||
| And so politics has just always been a part of my life. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And I always thought I understood politics until I got to Washington, D.C. | ||
| and until Hurricane Katrina. | ||
| And it just gave me an entirely different perspective. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| But anyway, long story short, you know, I took the typical route, graduated from high school. | ||
| My wife is my childhood sweetheart. | ||
| Her dad actually delivered me. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| That's the kind of small town we grew up in. | ||
| We've been married for, gosh, 40-some years. | ||
| I don't want to say how many. | ||
| And, you know, went to law school, raised two children, very successful, very, very successful children, and just had a pretty normal life, except that I knew I wanted to be a lawyer, but I always had this thought process that you never turn down, you always look at an opportunity, and if an opportunity looks good, You take that opportunity even if it's off the path you thought you were going to take. | ||
| And so that's led me to these incredible, incredible experiences in my life that most people don't do because they become lawyers and all they do is practice law their entire life. | ||
| That's not me. | ||
| So what was the first one of those moments when you thought, wow, there's a good opportunity, a little to the right, off that exit? | ||
| The Oklahoma Republican Party came to me and asked me to run for Congress back in 1988, promised me all of this money. | ||
| In fact, that governor, who was the first Republican governor, went on to be a U.S. | ||
| Senator and then came back. | ||
| He was a big supporter of me. | ||
| Who was that? | ||
| Henry Bellman. | ||
| Former U.S. | ||
| Senator. | ||
| He was involved in the Panama Canal treaties and everything. | ||
| The Oklahoma Republican Party recruited me and said, come on, we really want you to run. | ||
| I let Eagle get in the way, and I ran against a 12-term Democrat incumbent in a gerrymandered district where I got my butt beat. | ||
| It was an experience that, again, most Americans never do. | ||
| Most Americans never throw their hat in the ring and actually go out and say, I'm going to do it. | ||
| And I would encourage people, whether it's a city council, county commissioner, state representative, whatever it is, if you don't like the way things are going, if you're going to bitch about it, I don't want to hear about it unless you're actually involved doing something. | ||
| It doesn't mean you have to run for office, but you've got to be involved. | ||
| Yeah, it's so funny after the ringer that you've been through. | ||
| I guess it's, maybe it's not funny, it's either ironic or perfectly poetic, but that still is your message as someone that, you know, was sort of put up as the poster boy for everything that's wrong with the government. | ||
| Dave, let me tell you, it may be poetic, but it, sorry, I should quit pointing, it's the lawyer in me. | ||
| Yeah, go ahead. | ||
| I could tell you so many stories about how dysfunctional state... I was a city councilman. | ||
| I worked at the state legislature as the finance director. | ||
| I'm the undersecretary of Homeland Security. | ||
| I have been inside the bowels of the government, and I can tell you how it works, and it is not what most Americans think. | ||
| Yeah, and we're gonna get to all of that. | ||
| So the Undersecretary of Homeland Security, that is the Director of FEMA, correct? | ||
| That's just sort of the more technical term for that. | ||
| Were you involved in the administration before 9-11, or was it after that that's when Bush pegged you for this? | ||
| No, I was there, and in fact, I was in Montana getting ready to deliver a speech to the National Emergency Managers Association about the role of FEMA in terrorism on 9-11, 2001. | ||
| So you were the Director of FEMA at that time? | ||
| I was the General Counsel at that time. | ||
| And we ended up on a C-135 going back to Andrews Air Force Base. | ||
| Joe Albaugh, who was the Director at the time, immediately went to ground zero on that Wednesday morning. | ||
| And I went to the White House and just spent the next, gosh, seems like year, just day in and day out, just planning, getting ready for we didn't know what. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| What's the one thing that really sticks out in your mind about that day itself? | ||
| For the first time, you're flying alone. | ||
| There are no planes in the sky. | ||
| You're flying alone. | ||
| Some airman asked me if I want to go down in the tanker bay and just watch as we fly across, you know, middle America. | ||
| And I'm listening on the headset and the only chatter you hear are among the fighter jets that are flying around the country. | ||
| And when I landed, it was not knowing. | ||
| It was like there was this blank wall in front of us. | ||
| None of us knew what was going to happen next. | ||
| And so we meet in the Roosevelt Room and the Situation Room that next morning to get briefing by the CIA and everybody else. | ||
| And I remember just this, this quietness in the room. | ||
| that everybody knew that none of us knew what we were facing. | ||
| Yeah, was there a feeling that George W. Bush was the right guy to handle this? | ||
| Because for all the frustrations that people may have with him, and that perhaps you have related to some things with Katrina, and we can get into that. | ||
| I do remember at the time, and I lived in New York City at the time, so I was there for 9-11, my family was there, my grandma was there, my dad. | ||
| I do remember that between George W. Bush at the time, but particularly Giuliani, I think there was at least a feeling that these guys are sort of the right people to be handling this at the time. | ||
| Certainly Giuliani, at least from a New Yorker's perspective. | ||
| Did you feel that? | ||
| Did people feel that within the government that Bush was kind of able to handle this or had the right skill set to handle this? | ||
| Yes, it was. | ||
| For me, it was more the most, I can still remember vividly that day in the Roosevelt Room. | ||
| You've got Colin Powell. | ||
| You've got Donald Rumsfeld. | ||
| You've got Condi Rice. | ||
| You've got Andy Card. | ||
| So you have all these heavy hitters. | ||
| And then here's little old me sitting at the table, too. | ||
| And I remember watching, because I'm an observer of people. | ||
| And I remember watching all of them. | ||
| And there was none of the usual, because I've been in these meetings before, and there was none of the usual, hey, how you doing? | ||
| Everybody was at the table. | ||
| Everybody was reading their briefing. | ||
| Everybody was trying to understand. | ||
| We know that we always referred to the president as the boss. | ||
| We know the boss is going to ask some tough questions, and we know we're not going to have answers. | ||
| And that's indeed what happened. | ||
| You know, we had theories, we had ideas, we had plans, but nobody really knew for certain what was next. | ||
| Yeah, and especially in those first few days where we didn't know if another attack was coming or anything. | ||
| What was actually the job of FEMA for those first few days? | ||
| We're the nation's federal first responder. | ||
| We coordinate all of, for example, the Pentagon Ground Zero. | ||
| Our job was to make sure that we had all the urban search and rescue teams deployed, that we take care of the firefighters, we provide all the equipment, we provide the training, we do all of that stuff. | ||
| So our job was to clean up Ground Zero. | ||
| Our job was at the Pentagon to help clean that up. | ||
| And what was fascinating about it was, Normally, you go to a disaster. | ||
| It's not also a crime scene. | ||
| But in this case, both the Pentagon and in Pennsylvania, and obviously in Ground Zero, they were also crime scenes. | ||
| So we now had to coordinate. | ||
| Talk about federalism. | ||
| So now we had to coordinate, you know, the federal government, state government, local government. | ||
| And on top of that, we had to coordinate with the CIA, the FBI, the NSA, and everybody else who's doing all of the forensic work. | ||
| How does that go? | ||
| I mean, one of the things we talk about here a lot is sort of the unwieldy giant government we have right now, sort of all the middlemen and bureaucrats that get in the way of everything. | ||
| I mean, how did it really go, if that's your job? | ||
| Here's what's fascinating. | ||
| When the government's under pressure like that, Everybody does what you have to do. | ||
| My mother-in-law had this saying that drives my wife like crazy. | ||
| She's now deceased, but it was, you know, sometimes you just have to do what you have to do. | ||
| And when a crisis hits of that magnitude, it's all hands on deck. | ||
| And if you need to break the rules, people are willing to break the rules to make things happen. | ||
| So I would say that in those intense moments, That's probably when the government tends to do the best job, because everybody's trying their hardest to do what's best for the country. | ||
| Yeah, so how soon after that did W tap you to be the head of FEMA? | ||
| Let's see. | ||
| So, shortly after I became the Deputy Director, I'd say like just a couple of months later, I went from General Counsel to Deputy Director. | ||
| Then they announced the creation of the department. | ||
| Well, there's a story about the creation of DHS. | ||
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Yeah. | |
| So, they're going to create DHS. | ||
| So, W points me to the transition team. | ||
| We're one of five people putting together the department. | ||
| And I apologize to the nation for that because I've got lots of regrets about DHS. | ||
| I'm happy to talk about that. | ||
| Yeah, we will. | ||
| And then soon thereafter, Abba left, and that's when I became the Undersecretary and the Director of FEMA. | ||
| So probably within, gosh, a year. | ||
| Yeah, boy. | ||
| It's the mailman story. | ||
| You know, you start in the mailroom and you work your way up. | ||
| Yeah, and only two years after that, then the other crisis in your career, certainly. | ||
| So tell me a little bit about your regrets creating the Department of Homeland Security. | ||
| Here's a back story, first, that most people don't know. | ||
| The administration was opposed to the creation of the department. | ||
| We thought it was a huge mistake. | ||
| We're going to create this massive bureaucracy? | ||
| Why? | ||
| Things are working the way they're supposed to work. | ||
| But Congress felt this political desire that you have to be seen doing something. | ||
| So once Congress said, hey, we're going to move forward with legislation, then the White House says, | ||
| oh my God, now we've got to get in front of this 'cause we want to control it and mold it in our own view, | ||
| not Congress's view. | ||
| Because in effect, they don't want to get legislation put on his desk that he has to veto, | ||
| and then it's like, well, he's against Homeland Security. | ||
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So our job was to... What a great example of how screwed up government is right there. | |
| Oh, it is, it is. | ||
| So I'm thrown, me and four other guys, with Clay Johnson, the president's best friend, college roommate, deputy director of OMB, we're thrown together to create this massive new bureaucracy by taking 22 different cultures, 22 different cultures, 22 different organizations, and throwing them in together and trying to make it work. | ||
| What are a couple of those organizations that were thrown in there? | ||
| I mean, it's everybody, right? | ||
| Well, it was Secret Service. | ||
| What the hell is Secret Service doing in Homeland Security? | ||
| The Coast Guard. | ||
| The Coast Guard has this kind of schizophrenic role. | ||
| They work for Homeland Security, yet they're subjected to the Military Code of Conduct, and they kind of technically work for the Pentagon. | ||
| So, you've got that. | ||
| You've got ICE, Customs and Border Patrol, Immigration. | ||
| Different grants from the Department of Justice, FEMA. | ||
| Everybody had a different culture. | ||
| And my objection was, you can't throw different cultures together and really expect them to work, either in the short term or the long term. | ||
| Every organization, corporate, private, governmental, has a culture. | ||
| And trying to meld those is one of the most difficult things to do. | ||
| Look, I love Carly Fiorina, consider her a friend, but they brought Carly in to talk to us about how to do mergers and acquisitions. | ||
| And I'm thinking, wait a minute. | ||
| The HP merger and acquisition, that didn't seem to go too well, and you're going to tell us how to do this 22 government agency thing? | ||
| I mean, that's one objection. | ||
| Then the second objection was, you know, we've got airports with a major concern, and for whatever reason, we wanted to blame the private contractors, who have a vested interest in making sure that the airlines are secure, right? | ||
| But that's not good enough. | ||
| Instead, let's fire all of them, and let's create this massive new bureaucracy called the TSA, and I'm like the kid in the back of the classroom that keeps raising his hand and saying, but professor, why? | ||
| How's that gonna work? | ||
| But there was just this momentum. | ||
| And what would happen when you said something like that? | ||
| Because now, I think, in 2018, if you say something about the TSA, most people would agree with you. | ||
| What an unwieldy, ridiculous operation. | ||
| The reaction was always, well, we're gonna meet your objection by doing why. | ||
| And I had been around the block long enough to know that that answer was BS. | ||
| But when you're the one person out of five, you're outvoted. | ||
| So you tend to, there's a great Washington Post story that talks about Brown as the bureaucratic infighter. | ||
| And I was. | ||
| And the Post writes it as if that's a bad thing. | ||
| And I consider it a badge of honor. | ||
| Because I was fighting for just the reality that when you tell me that putting these different agencies together is going to be budget neutral, that's BS. | ||
| When you tell me you're gonna create TSA, but you're gonna prevent them from ever being a union, that's BS, because I just know how government metastasizes. | ||
| And so the TSA has turned out to be what I thought it was. | ||
| The dysfunction within DHS, while it may be minimally better, it's still a dysfunctional organization. | ||
| So let's back up for a second, because you mentioned that before this, the security, was it all done by private companies before the TSA? | ||
| That's almost hard to believe. | ||
| Was it all done by private? | ||
| Yes! | ||
| The airlines, who have, who has the most, now you think about just trying to figure out what's the best way to put a program together. | ||
| Well, who has the most interest in making certain that their planes are never hijacked or flown into buildings? | ||
| Oh, the airlines. | ||
| Why don't we let them decide security, because what do they, they have competing interests. | ||
| They want to make sure their planes are secure, their passengers are safe, but that the security operates in the most efficient and effective way. | ||
| Now, you tell me government's gonna care about those three things, BS. | ||
| Yeah, well, it's also so interesting, because it's like, what a great way to use competition in the right sense, where it's like, this airline that's doing it the right way, where they could go, you know what, look at our marks on security, so we're charging you $5 more, and a lot of people wouldn't have a problem with it. | ||
| It would be a beautiful thing. | ||
| I didn't realize that it was fully private before that. | ||
| Wow, so any other, I mean that's a pretty big issue, but any other big regrets related to CHS? | ||
| Yeah, well for example, we had within FEMA what was called the Catastrophic Disaster Response Group. | ||
| Everything has an acronym, so it was the CDRG. | ||
| And because the FEMA director under federal law, when in times of disaster, reports directly to the president, you're the president's representative. | ||
| So this CDRG, when there was a disaster like 9-11, we brought all of the cabinet departments and agencies together. | ||
| So you usually had the deputy secretaries there, because they were there on behalf of their bosses. | ||
| And we would deconflict policy, we would set priorities, and if State Department wanted to do one thing, but DOD wanted to do another, and AG wanted to do something else. | ||
| That was where we got all of those de-conflicted, because the FEMA director had the authority of the president sitting in that room. | ||
| Well, that's gone away now, and you've thrown these all together, and I've always said, if you want to find out whether a disaster is being handled properly or not, or any sort of crisis, this could be in the private sector, too, ask this question. | ||
| Who's in charge? | ||
| If you can't answer the question, who's in charge, then it's a cluster. | ||
| Is there an inherent... | ||
| There's a conflict here, which is that basically you're taking government people, and for someone like you that maybe wanted less government, and I think this is what you're really saying about Bush at the beginning of this. | ||
| He didn't want this. | ||
| The administration didn't want it. | ||
| But government, and this is the problem with libertarians in general, it's like people that want less government, well, if you're in the government, it's hard to look around the office and be like, guys, most of us probably shouldn't even be here. | ||
| We're gonna need new jobs, guys. | ||
| So when FEMA first started in 1979 under Jimmy Carter, They had a policy of providing ice to hospitals so that lactating mothers had a place where they could keep milk, where you could keep insulin and other medicines that require, pharmaceuticals that require refrigeration. | ||
| That ice was for hospitals to provide their local communities a place for the medicines to stay cool and safe and everything else. | ||
| That has metastasized, which is my favorite word to put. | ||
| It has metastasized now to where in a disaster we provide every Tom, Dick and Harry two bags of ice so that they can keep their hamburger cold or their Coors beer cold. | ||
| And I went to Congress and said, this is out of control. | ||
| We're spending tens of millions of dollars on ice so that a private citizen can keep their food cold. | ||
| Is that really a government function? | ||
| Even talking to conservatives on the Hill, let alone Democrats or Liberals or anybody else. | ||
| I was a heretic. | ||
| Because, oh my, we can't support that because that's taking something away from our constituents. | ||
| But you realize it's a waste, right? | ||
| Why should we be doing that? | ||
| Well, we can't stop it now. | ||
| Yeah, I mean, it's fascinating, and then you just get all these sort of middle management bureaucrats in, and man, no one's gonna give up that power. | ||
| So, was there anything else major between, for you professionally, between 9-11 and Katrina? | ||
| Like, what were you doing a month before that? | ||
| Was it still all DHS-related and all that? | ||
| Yes. | ||
| We had the Columbia Space Shuttle disaster, which we had to coordinate with NASA because NASA was in shock, so we had to help them do all the search and rescue from California to Texas. | ||
| We had huge wildfires in California that were just massive, kind of like they've recently experienced. | ||
| We had fires throughout the West, flooding in the Midwest. | ||
| We had the tsunami in Southeast Asia. | ||
| I mean, I could go on and on and on. | ||
| Yes, my life was just full of hell from 9-11 on. | ||
| Until the Katrina moment, what was the general feeling about you? | ||
| Because now we'll get into this, where you were then used as this... Well, I was competent, knew what I was doing. | ||
| The White House always turned to me to get things done. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Okay, so I'll take your word for it, but by and large, you were thought of as a confident executive and everything else. | ||
| Okay, so now FEMA happens. | ||
| I love the story that you told right at the beginning, because what a perfect story of just awful abuse of power, go check out my home instead of the disaster areas and all that kind of stuff. | ||
| There was a certain amount of time we knew that this thing was gonna be Crazy, right? | ||
| We knew before what happened it was going to be crazy. | ||
| Because we had, I had gone to Congress and asked for an appropriation. | ||
| I actually wanted to spend some tax money. | ||
| To plan for 10 truly catastrophic disasters. | ||
| Something like a hurricane. | ||
| You're a former New Yorker. | ||
| Can you imagine Category 5 going up the Hudson River? | ||
| Can you imagine something happening to the LNG natural gas port in Boston? | ||
| A terrorist incident there. | ||
| Imagine the big one hitting California, or the New Madrid Fault. | ||
| Imagine, because New Orleans is a fishbowl, a Category 5 filling up New Orleans. | ||
| So Congress had given me money to start doing catastrophic planning for these kinds of things. | ||
| New Orleans was the first one we picked. | ||
| And when we did a tabletop exercise to see if we could coordinate the response, the tabletop exercise fell apart, Dave. | ||
| So I knew, probably nine, 12 months before Katrina actually occurred, that we weren't ready. | ||
| So what does that actually mean when you're doing a tabletop exercise? | ||
| Yes, you get all the players in the room and you pretend like you're going through a disaster. | ||
| So what are you doing? | ||
| What are you doing? | ||
| What are you doing? | ||
| What are the conflicts? | ||
| How do we de-conflict all these policy issues? | ||
| Do we have enough food? | ||
| How do we get DOD to, does DOD have enough equipment on hand to get in food supplies and everything else? | ||
| You exercise that around a table and Louisiana fell apart. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Wouldn't work. | ||
| Was it right at the beginning of it that you realized how severe it was? | ||
| I've been criticized because in May of 2005, I had my wife... This is before Katrina. | ||
| Yes, this is before Katrina. | ||
| In May of 2005, several friends of mine, including Colin Powell, had said, you know what, it's probably time to leave. | ||
| And I asked them, seriously, why is it? | ||
| You've done everything that you can do in terms of trying to mold DHS into what you think it should be, and nothing else is going to happen. | ||
| It is what it is. | ||
| You have fought the good fight. | ||
| You've been here six years, you know, and of course my wife was, it's time to go back to Colorado. | ||
| Let's go back to Colorado. | ||
| And so I told Andy Card, the White House Chief of Staff, in May of 05, that I wanted to resign and go back to Colorado. | ||
| And what typically happens, Andy said, can you wait till Labor Day and go through one more hurricane season for us? | ||
| And that'll give us time to find a replacement. | ||
| Now, when the president asks you to stay for five more months, sure, I can do that. | ||
| Man, Labor Day. | ||
| What was the day that Katrina hit? | ||
| It was August 29th. | ||
| August 29th, Labor Day, whatever it is, seven, eight days later. | ||
| Okay, so it hits. | ||
| I mean, I can remember watching everything on CNN at the time. | ||
| You mentioned Nagin, who is the mayor of New Orleans, right? | ||
| New Orleans, right. | ||
| How chaotic was it to coordinate, after you said this initial test had failed about a year before? | ||
| It was virtually impossible. | ||
| So I landed the Superdome. | ||
| The Superdome, well, let's go back a step. | ||
| Before I actually went to New Orleans, before the storm made landfall, Max Mayfield, who was the director of the National Hurricane Center, fellow Okie, he and I got on the phone together, and we knew how bad the storm was going to be, but we could not get the attention of state officials, and frankly, we couldn't get the attention of the DOD and State Department and other people that would be playing a role. | ||
| How is that possible? | ||
| You now had this new DHS that was supposed to be coordinating all these wonderful things. | ||
| Well, exactly. | ||
| Who's in charge? | ||
| Remember who's in charge? | ||
| Well, everybody's now competing for their pecking order because of DHS. | ||
| So I tell Max Mayfield, would you please explain, because I'm going to have Bush's in Crawford. | ||
| He'll be on the civets call, this top secret phone conference video and everything. | ||
| And I'll have the mayor, the governor of all the Gulf states there. | ||
| Jeb will be there for Florida. | ||
| And I need you to read them the Riot Act about how bad this is going to be. | ||
| And he did. | ||
| And then I pulled out an engineering report that said the New Orleans Superdome cannot even withstand a category three based upon engineering reports, and the mayor just announced that he's gonna use the Superdome as a shelter of last resort. | ||
| I'm screaming on this call, you can't do that, that's a huge mistake, blah, blah, blah. | ||
| At this point, what category did they think it was gonna be? | ||
| We thought it was gonna be a five. | ||
| When it actually hit, it was a three. | ||
| But as we all know, it's still ripped off the roof of the, Superdome. | ||
| So I knew going in it was going to be bad. | ||
| I say all that to lead to this one point. | ||
| The day that I'm leaving to fly to Baton Rouge, I remember exactly where I was. | ||
| I was on 195 going around the Pentagon. | ||
| And I called Joe Hagan, the Deputy Chief of Staff, to tell him that I'm headed to Andrews. | ||
| I'm going down. | ||
| We're doing everything we can. | ||
| And I said, Joe, but this is going to be a cluster because I can't get stuff coordinated now. | ||
| And the storm hasn't even hit. | ||
| And because I had already told him I wanted to leave, I said in an email to Hagan, hey, can I quit now? | ||
| And of course, everybody picks that up. | ||
| Oh, look, Brown doesn't care. | ||
| He wants to quit before the storm even hits. | ||
| That's fascinating. | ||
| I mean, I remember that. | ||
| For sure, I remember that. | ||
| Yeah, and-- | ||
| You were just being sarcastic. | ||
| I'm a sarcastic guy. | ||
| I'm a total smart ass. | ||
| And so I had already agreed to stay through Labor Day. | ||
| I knew I was walking into a buzzsaw, and I'm telling Hagan, hey, can I quit now? | ||
| And of course, the New York Times, you know, foils all of my emails. | ||
| They see the jokes that I crack. | ||
| Because let me tell you something, Dave, not to get off the subject here, but when people are suffering, and people That are the rescue workers, the firefighters, that are taking people off roofs, that are taking them out of flooded homes. | ||
| They're working their asses off. | ||
| They're tired. | ||
| They're worn out. | ||
| They're stressed out. | ||
| You know what the best thing to do is? | ||
| Give them a little humor. | ||
| Show a little humanity. | ||
| My father-in-law was a surgeon. | ||
| He used to talk about how he would relieve stress in the O.R. | ||
| by cracking jokes. | ||
| And I've always thought that the best way to manage people in a time of stress is to remind them of their humanity. | ||
| Make them laugh. | ||
| And if they can laugh for five seconds, that gets the endorphins running, and they can go out and keep working 24 hours a day, seven days a week. | ||
| And I was criticized for joking. | ||
| Well, you know what? | ||
| Screw them. | ||
| Because I've been asked before, well, would you take any of those emails back? | ||
| Not a one of them. | ||
| Because you know what? | ||
| That made a staffer smile. | ||
| That made somebody laugh. | ||
| And if you don't understand the context within which it was made, then you are deliberately just trying to make hay out of something. | ||
| All right, so let's get back to that 10 seconds of video. | ||
| The exact line, even though everyone says, it's a heck of a job, Brownie. | ||
| They don't even get that, right? | ||
| He actually said, Brownie, you're doing a heck of a job. | ||
| Yes, thank you, thank you. | ||
| Yeah, I just want to clean that up for you, because even that line, they don't get quite right. | ||
| How many days into the hurricane was that? | ||
| Oh gosh, I wanna say it was maybe four, maybe five days. | ||
| I conflate time, but four or five days. | ||
| Okay, so four or five days. | ||
| Now, I watched plenty of other video today of what you were doing at the time, and you're standing there, people can see this on YouTube, you're standing there with giant maps of the whole area. | ||
| It was very clear to me, at least watching it now, that you had total command of where things were and who was supposed to be where and where water was going to hit harder. | ||
| And Bush, to his credit, it seemed that he was listening along with you and doing the best job I think that he could. | ||
| After, was it three minutes after he says that that you realized, or that the media went crazy with it? | ||
| No, it was the minute he said it. | ||
| Because here's what you don't know. | ||
| What most people don't know is that I had told the, I called Air Force One and said, when he lands and gets here, I need five minutes before we do any sort of public photo op. | ||
| And when you, Even at my level, the Undersecretary, even when you say, I've got to have five minutes with the President, they still want to know why. | ||
| And I said, because he's got to understand, before he walks in front of cameras, how bad things are in New Orleans. | ||
| Because we're going to leave that Air National Guard base, get on Marine One, and we're going to fly to New Orleans, and he's going to start seeing how screwed up it is in New Orleans. | ||
| And I want to make sure he understands that before he gets there. | ||
| So, sure, we've got plenty of time. | ||
| So, we walk into the Green Room. | ||
| I'm just starting to talk to the President, and they come in and say, we've got to get moving. | ||
| Press is out here. | ||
| We're already running late. | ||
| And they pull him out, and I don't have time to brief him on how bad it is. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Wow. | |
| So, the moment, and here's what really happened. | ||
| Bob Riley, who was the Governor of Alabama, former Congressman, good friend of mine, we were doing great in Alabama. | ||
| Things were perfect in Alabama. | ||
| Things were very good in Mississippi. | ||
| It was just Louisiana. | ||
| So Bob Riley, being the supportive guy that he is, said, oh by the way, Mr. President, I just want you to know that FEMA's doing a great job in Alabama. | ||
| And that's when the President said, boom, slapped me in the gut. | ||
| And it was at that moment, Dave, that I knew, oh my God. | ||
| Now, three things have happened. | ||
| The press knows that I've got a relationship with the President that I have a nickname. | ||
| So I'm one of the few people in the inner circle that has a nickname. | ||
| Two, the press knows how bad things are in New Orleans, and now both me and the boss look like we're totally out of touch about what's happening down the Gulf. | ||
| God, I mean, there's so much there when you really realize how this was happening. | ||
| Yeah, if you watch that closely, you'll see me grimace, because I was just like, holy Yeah. | ||
| So, okay, so once that happened, how much of what your job became was just dealing with media craziness? | ||
| Total. | ||
| Total. | ||
| Not just the media, but now with a Secretary of Homeland Security by the name of Michael Chertoff, who had never done any sort of operations in his life. | ||
| He was an appellate court judge. | ||
| An appellate court judge has clerks that bring you briefs and say, "Here's what we | ||
| think your decision should be. | ||
| You sit behind a desk. | ||
| You take your time." | ||
| You don't realize that if you put off a decision for 30 minutes in the middle of a | ||
| disaster, that translates to three hours, and that costs lives. | ||
| So now I'm dealing with a boss in D.C. that doesn't have a clue what he's doing, who's | ||
| mad at me because I'm on a Gulf Stream trying to get from Mobile to Gulfport to Baton Rouge | ||
| to New Orleans and trying to keep my fingers on everything going on, who tells me, "I'm | ||
| tired of you flying around because I can't find you." | ||
| And I'm thinking, you can't find me? | ||
| I'm on a government Gulfstream that's got satellites. | ||
| You can find me anywhere in the world if you want to. | ||
| So, tells me to plant my button in Baton Rouge. | ||
| And I turn to my staff and say, this is the beginning of the end. | ||
| They're after me. | ||
| The media's after me. | ||
| Chertoff's after me. | ||
| They're looking for a scapegoat. | ||
| I'm not that stupid. | ||
| I mean, I know what's going on. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Are there any points of criticism during that time that you think are legit? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes. | |
| Yes. | ||
| I have a friend who is a psychiatrist at the Kennedy School of Government and the School of Public Health. | ||
| And I asked him one time. | ||
| I said, there was a point during Katrina where you haven't known me but a few minutes now, but I think you can tell I'm a pretty type A person. | ||
| Pretty energetic. | ||
| I'm pretty engaged in whatever I do. | ||
| I'm passionate about what I do. | ||
| And I asked my buddy, I said, so I know that there was a point where I was just frozen. | ||
| I literally could not make a decision. | ||
| What happens? | ||
| He drew me a cartoon. | ||
| The Great Wizard of Oz. | ||
| Well, it's a picture of me in the first panel, pushing all these buttons and levers and turning wheels and stuff. | ||
| In the second panel, I'm staring at that same group of buttons like, what's going on? | ||
| And in the third panel, I've gone around to look behind and all the wires have been cut. | ||
| And he says that physiologically, Whether it's PTSD, it's a natural phenomenon in the brain, that when we are trained, like if I have trained myself that when I tell my staff, do X, I expect X to happen. | ||
| When you and I turn on these lights, or flip a switch, we expect the lights to come on. | ||
| Now you add all of the physical stress, the emotional stress, and nothing is working, the brain starts to shut down. | ||
| And I will freely admit, and this is why I, to this day, I saw a firefighter the other day on the street while I was having lunch. | ||
| And I walked up to him and I said, what are you doing? | ||
| We've been doing training, and I'm taking the guys out for lunch. | ||
| And I said, well, you don't know who I am, but let me just tell you that, you know, making sure those guys have time off and that they get rest, that's the most important thing you can do. | ||
| Because if they don't get rest when they're fighting the fires, they themselves can become victims of that disaster. | ||
| So we've got to learn to train ourselves that when we're under that kind of stress, you have to be able to step back. | ||
| And this is when I speak about resilience. | ||
| I've learned to try to teach audiences that we all have a network. | ||
| And what we have to do is learn that when we find ourselves in those moments that we're either not making the right decisions or we're not making decisions, we need some external force to come in and kind of slap some sense into us and say, change your perspective. | ||
| What I see is this. | ||
| If somebody had helped me do that during Katrina, Might've still had the presidential bus run me over, but at least I would've known why and what was happening. | ||
| But is that almost counter to the way a sort of big government has to operate? | ||
| Yes, of course it is. | ||
| You can't have people running around smacking people and trying to get them to wake up because the machine is so stiff, basically. | ||
| But what I needed, my very best friend and my lawyer, Andy Lester, who went through all the congressional hearings with me, To this day, he'll tell you that he regrets not getting in his car and driving to Baton Rouge, because he's watching this from a distance. | ||
| And he's seeing what's happening. | ||
| And he knows me well enough that he could tell that I'm just frozen. | ||
| Like, nothing's working. | ||
| What do I do next? | ||
| And I just needed that external force to come in and say, you're right, nothing's working. | ||
| Here's why. | ||
| Let's take inventory. | ||
| Have you slept? | ||
| No, I haven't slept for three days. | ||
| Maybe you ought to go try to take an Ambien and at least get four hours of sleep. | ||
| It's that kind of stuff that makes a huge difference. | ||
| But at that point, also with what was happening because of the media, you were sort of just in a feeding frenzy. | ||
| It was like a self-fulfilling prophecy. | ||
| It was absolutely self-fulfilling, that's right. | ||
| To this day, I'm always amazed. | ||
| I mean, I could go through the litany of falsehoods that I'm no longer defensive about because they're falsehoods and it is what it is. | ||
| And I love talking about them in front of, you know, corporate CEOs and titans of industry who think they know that they can run everything. | ||
| Well, let me tell you, someday the proverbial feces is going to hit the fan in your company and you're going to want to learn these lessons and learn them well. | ||
| That's why I run a small business here. | ||
| Good for you, that's right. | ||
| We have a very little middle management here. | ||
| Very good, that's right. | ||
| What do you make of just sort of the, I guess this is just part of the human condition, the idea that we always need someone to blame? | ||
| Now, you are acknowledging that not everything went right, and you didn't make every right decision, and we're acknowledging government over nonsense and all that, but just this need to blame, because I think you are one of the first examples, because maybe it was sort of just at the beginnings of social media or online stuff, of just like, let's just take this guy, we didn't know who he was yesterday, And let's just destroy, we'll destroy his career and then we'll try to destroy his life. | ||
| What do you make of just that general psychological incentive? | ||
| Well, there's two ways to look at it. | ||
| In Judaism, there is the philosophy of finding the scapegoat and putting all the sins of the community, putting all the sins of the village on the goat and throwing the goat over the cliff. | ||
| Well, I think that really is applicable to life in general. | ||
| And we have, through social media, I can't even imagine what it would have been like with social media back in 2005. | ||
| It was brutal enough without it. | ||
| But I think we have When you think about the hierarchy of needs that people have, belonging, love, power, social media has amplified all of those. | ||
| And the feeling of being superior to somebody else so permeates our society that any chance we have to squish somebody, it makes, I don't know whether it's an endorphin rush, adrenaline, but something, but we now have this horrible, horrible desire to just destroy people. | ||
| They have lives, they have families. | ||
| Now, some people, maybe they deserve it, maybe they don't. | ||
| But I like to think that everybody, unless you're just totally a doofus, people are actually trying to do the best they can. | ||
| Yeah, I mean, I'm a firm believer in that. | ||
| But yes, of course, there are people that wanna just destroy. | ||
| Unfortunately, I think social media has amplified those people. | ||
| The best antidote to that is? | ||
| Me. | ||
| Because I refused to stay down. | ||
| There were people that actually advised me, you need to slither away. | ||
| And I was like, are you kidding? | ||
| I cannot wait for these congressional hearings because I can't wait for some dumb ass congressman or dumb ass senator who thinks that he's God's gift to creation to ask me a question because I'm gonna tell him the truth whether he likes it or not. | ||
| So let's talk about those hearings a little bit because when you see, just any hearing. | ||
| Any hearing related to anything, it strikes me as patently obvious that pretty much the senators and congressmen have almost no idea what they're talking about, really. | ||
| But they've been handed a brief and they've been told by a handler or whoever, these are the three questions you gotta ask, because we gotta get you on CNN tonight, so then you can push this and blah, blah, blah. | ||
| Do the hearings, when they're trying to unpackage all of this, do the hearings ever, Make things better at the end? | ||
| Is there ever a hearing that ends and then they go, we really solved the problems of why Katrina happened, why the levies fell, what the problems were with FEMA or other responders, et cetera, et cetera. | ||
| Rarely. | ||
| In fact, let me tell you, it's actually worse than what you think it is. | ||
| Right, it's just more government growing. | ||
| It's more government growing, but to tell you how bad it really is, As the Undersecretary, if I'm going to testify, now I was a private citizen when I testified in the Katrina hearings. | ||
| Wait, just to be clear, so how long after the heck of a job, Brownie, until you resigned? | ||
| Well, I actually, interestingly, I resigned on September 11th of 2005. | ||
| But then they came to me and said, oh, we need you to stay on because we've got to figure out just what's going on, because they're going to come after the administration. | ||
| So we want to keep you in the fold for a while. | ||
| So they kept me on as a consultant for, I want to say, four or five months afterwards. | ||
| And then I pulled... You must have been seriously pissed at that point, because now you knew you were just... | ||
| So I pulled the trigger and said, no more consulting. | ||
| I'm a private citizen. | ||
| And so when I'm called to testify, the White House has to do one of two things. | ||
| They have to either accept that I'm going to tell the truth, or they have to invoke executive privilege and prevent me from testifying. | ||
| And we deliberately set it up with Susan Collins and Joe Lieberman for Senator Lieberman to | ||
| ask me a question about conversations with the President or the White House so that when | ||
| that question was asked, my lawyer could say, "My client wants to answer the question, but | ||
| he cannot if the White House is going to invoke executive privilege." | ||
| Which then allowed Senator Lieberman to see how the charade works. | ||
| Then allows Senator Lieberman to ask, is there anyone in this hearing room from the White House who wants to invoke executive privilege? | ||
| And of course the room's silent. | ||
| I'm pretty sure that's not how it works. | ||
| I don't know everything about government. | ||
| And Senator Lieberman laughed and said, oh, I'm sure there are plenty of people from the White House here, but apparently nobody wants to invoke executive privilege. | ||
| Mr. Brown, answer the question. | ||
| And boom, we were off to the races. | ||
| But to go back about just a regular hearing. | ||
| If an undersecretary or any other government official is going to go testify, his testimony is cleared through the Office of Management and Budget. | ||
| That testimony is given to the senators and congressmen in advance. | ||
| The questions are given to the witness in advance. | ||
| It is a show. | ||
| It is a production. | ||
| How much of it also is that they're asking you things as if everything sort of works perfectly? | ||
| In any of the hearings, you know, in Hillary, the Benghazi hearings, just any of these hearings, where they're asking minute by minute, what did you say then to this person, that person? | ||
| I mean, I know in my own daily life, you asked me what happened three days ago at noon, you know? | ||
| I don't know, I'd have to think about it for a while, but maybe I can figure it out. | ||
| Maybe, maybe not, you come up with it, right. | ||
| Yeah, but just that they're trying to get you on every little thing, plus the pressures of you're under oath, you have the media watching and everything else. | ||
| I mean, it just seems like it's a recipe for nothing good, nothing substantial to come out of it. | ||
| Nothing substantial does come out of it. | ||
| Now, I think there's an exception if, in the House or Senate, if they are truly conducting an investigation. | ||
| And here's how to tell if they're truly conducting an investigation. | ||
| They'll depose witnesses outside the hearing room. | ||
| They will ask a witness, either voluntarily or with a subpoena, to come in and subject to a deposition by staff lawyers. | ||
| That's a real investigation. | ||
| That's really sitting you down and saying, swear to tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth, now let us ask you a series of questions. | ||
| And that can actually result in something productive. | ||
| Now for the witness you have to be very careful because, like anything else, to your point, What did you do on Wednesday at noon? | ||
| I went to this bagel shop down the street and had lunch. | ||
| What was the name of it? | ||
| Well, I think it was X. They find out, actually, you went to a burger stand and had a burger. | ||
| Now they've got you on perjury. | ||
| It's crazy. | ||
| It really is crazy. | ||
| So what was the resolution then? | ||
| When the hearings ended, what do they do? | ||
| So then they issue a report. | ||
| They issue a report. | ||
| There's a report. | ||
| And the report, I get a kick out of this because the report Virtually acknowledged everything that I had said was wrong about the integration of FEMA and these other agencies in the DHS. | ||
| There was a virtual admission to that. | ||
| Then the things that they wanted to do to correct it were, I don't want to over exaggerate, so let's just say 50%. | ||
| They in essence adopted about 50% of the things I've been arguing about. | ||
| Is it working? | ||
| It's not working because the way things go in D.C., whoever has the money has the power. | ||
| And you can't one day, I'm using the current FEMA director who's a former employee of mine as an example, you can't expect him on a day-to-day basis. | ||
| What's his name? | ||
| Brock Long. | ||
| Used to be at the National Hurricane Center emergency manager in Alabama. | ||
| He's a great guy. | ||
| I love this guy. | ||
| Probably shouldn't have said that because that would probably hurt him somehow. | ||
| I just now regret having said that. | ||
| Let's edit that out. | ||
| We don't edit for content here, but you probably made his tenure about a year shorter. | ||
| Right, exactly. | ||
| So where was I going with that? | ||
| Well, the reports. | ||
| Oh, the reports. | ||
| If you're fighting on a day-to-day basis for your budget with the Secretary of Homeland Security and all the other undersecretaries, and then when a disaster hits, now you're the boss and the secretary is subordinate to you, Can you imagine doing that in the private sector? | ||
| One day you're the CEO, but under certain circumstances, you as the CEO are actually subordinate to somebody else on your staff. | ||
| I mean, that's an untenable situation, but that's kind of the situation they created with the Post-Katrina Act. | ||
| It's crazy. | ||
| So we touched, obviously, on the media portion of this, and I mentioned how when I was Googling you this morning as I'm doing research, half the articles come up are about the 10-year anniversary, and they're still attacking. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Now again, you have sat here and acknowledged that you did not do everything perfectly, but what do you make of that in a more broad sense about the media? | ||
| Because I talk about the media a lot here, and I'm extremely frustrated with mainstream media, and it's almost gotten to the point where every time they write something bad about somebody, I start thinking that they're actually the good guy, because I see the way they do it to me. | ||
| That the media really has completely gotten out of control. | ||
| They've lost all integrity. | ||
| This is what I do on my own radio program. | ||
| I don't ever try to tell people what to think. | ||
| I try to give them a different perspective so that they can, with their own minds, maybe think about something a different way. | ||
| If you look through those 10-year anniversary things, there's one example that just stands out that to this day irritates me. | ||
| The highest level of security clearances with the CIA, the NSA. | ||
| I had a Q clearance with the Department of Energy, which means I had access to all the nuke secrets and everything else. | ||
| Top secret special access programs? | ||
| That was me. | ||
| I don't know if you're going to drop any other secret knowledge while you're on the show. | ||
| Yeah, that's right. | ||
| So I had all these clearances and everything else. | ||
| Time Magazine ran a story that I had lied on my resume. | ||
| Now, my first reaction when they ran that story was, sue the bastards! | ||
| I want to go after them! | ||
| And then my lawyer starts explaining to me, OK, first of all, you're going to have to prove they did it with willful malice because you're a public figure. | ||
| Then you're going to have to go through all of the Do you want to relive all of that? | ||
| Or do you really care about Time Magazine having some story that's now 10, 12, 15 years old about you lying on your resume, when you know what the truth is, and half of America knows what the truth is, and the other half of America you don't really care about? | ||
| No. | ||
| But the media gets by with it. | ||
| Now, I am not, I am not, repeat not, Going down the road that Trump goes down that says we need to change the libel laws. | ||
| I'm just pointing out that the media has this amazing power, and with that power, I believe, comes responsibility, and they've abdicated the responsibility. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| You know, I'm 50-50 on the libel thing. | ||
| Everyone that's watching the show knows that I am an absolute free speech absolutist. | ||
| That's why I said absolute twice there. | ||
| But I do believe in libel laws and I do believe we should have these laws to protect privacy and a series of other things. | ||
| I don't know, I would prefer that they don't be changed because I don't think we need the government doing anything. | ||
| I agree. | ||
| I don't think we need more laws, I don't think we need more regulations or any of that. | ||
| Yet there is something that I see so consistently these days where they just pick somebody and it's often people that I have on this show because they're right in the thick of important conversations. | ||
| And we say one thing here, and then I read the article about it the day after, and it's literally the reverse, or they cut the word not. | ||
| Or didn't, instead of did. | ||
| Dave, what I have found that I find fascinating, and I know that media is in this transition. | ||
| I mean, look what you and I are doing. | ||
| They hate what you and I are doing right now because it throws their business model out the window. | ||
| I think what they, like I'll be doing a story on air, And I've got the article in front of me. | ||
| And I'm kind of a grammar nut. | ||
| And I'll look at it and I'll go, holy crap! | ||
| An editor never even looked at this! | ||
| The Wall Street Journal! | ||
| The stellar newspaper, right? | ||
| Have they fired all their editors? | ||
| I find so many grammatical errors, punctuation errors. | ||
| I just think the media is in this flux. | ||
| So you add the flux with their Their agenda at times, their sloppiness. | ||
| You add all of those things together, the media is just not filling their fourth estate responsibilities. | ||
| So how do we clean up some of this government stuff? | ||
| I suspect, although you just said you're not with Trump on the libel stuff, I suspect that there's a certain amount of deregulation that he's doing and cutting back some of these agencies that you've gotta be pretty happy with. | ||
| I'm ecstatic about it. | ||
| When you think about You'll find this a bizarre example, but whether it's here in California or back in Colorado, wherever we might be, I challenge people watching this, go look at any government office. | ||
| And I would bet it's the nicest office building in your community. | ||
| Now wait a minute, who paid for that? | ||
| The guys in the garage who are coming up with the next big thing, some start-up company, or some guy that's working an 8 to 5 blue-collar job that's got his hands dirty and his nails are cracked and he's working with his hands like crazy, they're paying for that! | ||
| Shouldn't it be the reverse? | ||
| Shouldn't the government actually be in the garages? | ||
| Shouldn't they actually be the ones that are in the office buildings that, you know, they have to go up 20 elevators to get to their offices instead of having all the edifices that we allow them to use and create and build? | ||
| We have this perverted sense that the government, and I think it's getting worse, that the government is the answer to everything and that somehow government's going to solve all of our problems. | ||
| Let me tell you, The government doesn't solve problems. | ||
| The government causes problems. | ||
| So what would you say the answer is related to? | ||
| So DHS or FEMA now, or anything else? | ||
| I mean, if these things didn't exist, I'm sure somebody's watching this right now, and go, what do you mean? | ||
| I mean, if these things didn't exist, well now, you know, New Orleans still is below sea level, which is a whole, that, you know, let's just talk about that for a second. | ||
| Because there are a certain amount of people that now say, well, wait a minute, wait a minute. | ||
| Because they don't realize it, then they hear it, and they go, wait a minute, we have a city that's below sea level, that has all of these, you know, structural problems. | ||
| Maybe we shouldn't be living there anymore. | ||
| What do you say to someone like that? | ||
| Well, first of all, I think anybody should be able to live wherever they want to live. | ||
| If I want to live next to the National Forest in Boulder County, Colorado, I should be able to do that. | ||
| But then I should also assume the risk of living there. | ||
| If I want to live on the fault lines in California, I should be able to do that. | ||
| But I should assume the risk. | ||
| I think government has some basic services to provide. | ||
| We all agree that police protection, fire protection, that's something we all want to pay for. | ||
| If you're going to deliberately choose to live below sea level, and then, why should... I want to be very careful about how I phrase this. | ||
| Yeah, I can feel it already, why it's slippery. | ||
| Yeah, it's slippery because I think they should be able to live there. | ||
| If you choose to live there, though, it's the responsibility of the taxpayers that live there to create those levies and build those levies and maintain those levies, because I don't live there. | ||
| It's not my responsibility. | ||
| I pay taxes to take care of the hazards where I live. | ||
| And frankly, I don't think the government should take care of all hazards. | ||
| Because if we try to start, if we start trying to protect the American population from all | ||
| of the hazards that we face, we will end up with a totalitarian government. | ||
| Because there's too many hazards, too many risks. | ||
| So this is sort of the case where the people that were down there in New Orleans, it's not just, I'm sure most of them had, or I can't say most, but I'm sure a good portion, at least of the people that had money, had insurance and probably had flood insurance and everything else. | ||
| But it's that afterwards, all this federal money comes in to help the rebuild, but you're saying there, perhaps, that that doesn't quite make sense. | ||
| Is that basically what you're saying? | ||
| There will be people who will say, oh my God, the former director of the Federal Emergency Management Agency is saying we should revisit. | ||
| Absolutely. | ||
| We have a concept of federalism in this country. | ||
| We have federal, state, and local government. | ||
| And at the top, let's reverse that. | ||
| We have the people, we have local government, state government, and federal government. | ||
| That's the order. | ||
| And what we have done is we have taken the federal government and we've almost made them the local fire department. | ||
| We've almost made them the local police department. | ||
| And in many aspects, that's actually true. | ||
| TSA, for example. | ||
| We've made them the local police department. | ||
| Even though I'm going to be a lawyer here, they have no law enforcement authority. | ||
| They just think they do. | ||
| They have zero law enforcement authority. | ||
| What does that actually mean? | ||
| They have zero law enforcement authority. | ||
| I mean, if you go through and you've got a knife in your pocket, well, oh, then they just hand you off to whoever the local authority is, or they hand you off to the feds. | ||
| They gotta get a cop. | ||
| They gotta get a cop. | ||
| They can't arrest you, they can't detain you, they can't do anything. | ||
| But they call themselves officers because they want to put on the mask of authority. | ||
| Because the government always wants to put on the mask of authority, because that's how you keep the citizens kind of subdued. Well, my whole point about FEMA becoming | ||
| kind of this first responder, the more we rely on the federal government to come in after | ||
| any sort of disaster, that weakens state and local governments because they become more and | ||
| more dependent upon the federal government. | ||
| So more and more things get nationalized. | ||
| And the more things get nationalized, the more we turn into a Western European socialist-type government, which we know is not going to happen in our lifetimes. | ||
| Don't get me wrong. | ||
| The tinfoil hat's not on. | ||
| But I do believe That republics eventually fail. | ||
| And we are on this path, that if we keep going down this path of throwing more and more things up against the wall for the federal government to handle and take care of, we will end up as a Western European socialist government, and over generations and generations, that leads to tyranny. | ||
| So then you must be digging Trump. | ||
| On this. | ||
| Oh, on this stuff, absolutely. | ||
| The thing that bothers me, look, The president wasn't my first choice. | ||
| Before we go too deep on him, I do want to mention that we are taping this a little bit in advance of when it's going to air. | ||
| So if anything has happened in the last couple of days, I just want to be very, very clear. | ||
| Because who knows what happens in the next few days. | ||
| It wasn't my first choice, but when it came down to the typical dichotomy of Republican versus Democrat, I still think I still want to believe that Republicans are the government of individualism and individual liberty and everything, although I could argue that they aren't necessarily that way. | ||
| And the Democrats are moving to the hard, progressive, almost Marxist left. | ||
| So, when it comes to the general election, if I want to vote for one of those two, I'm going to vote for Trump. | ||
| I only say that because he has totally upended what it means I work for George W. Bush, who people thought couldn't speak well, but I thought was smart, knew what he was doing. | ||
| I think Trump is smart. | ||
| I think he knows what he's doing. | ||
| But he's the first president in this age of Twitter and Facebook and everything else. | ||
| And I just don't think we've quite figured out how to deal with that. | ||
| And quite honestly, I don't think he's quite figured out how to deal with it. | ||
| He hasn't quite figured out that as president, if I say something even innocuous, They're reading that in Beijing. | ||
| They're reading that in Moscow. | ||
| They're reading that in Pyongyang. | ||
| They're reading it everywhere. | ||
| And so he needs to be a little more, I just wish he would be a little more circumspect in the use of social media. | ||
| Yeah, right. | ||
| Enough about Trump. | ||
| Let's just talk about George W. Bush for a second, because you mentioned he was your boss, you know him well. | ||
| You know, there was the caricature, of course, of all the years of his presidency that he was some sort of idiot or, you know, yes, he had a strange way of speaking and kind of stilted and, you know, A lot of that, right? | ||
| He mixed up a lot of words. | ||
| I mean, tell me something about him that maybe would give us a little other side that we wouldn't know. | ||
| Because there's an odd nostalgia. | ||
| That's what I'm trying to say. | ||
| There's an odd nostalgia about him now because I see it from people on the left all the time now. | ||
| They're sort of galvanizing him, right? | ||
| They're lionizing him now because of Trump. | ||
| He and I were in the limo. | ||
| We were in the Beast, Southern California, going back to Marine One. | ||
| And we're on these kind of rural areas. | ||
| And people have lined the streets. | ||
| And Eddie, who was his agent in charge of presidential detail, He kept telling Eddie, and I want to use these words carefully, Eddie, stop the car. | ||
| These people want to see their president. | ||
| It wasn't Eddie, stop the car. | ||
| They want to see me. | ||
| Eddie, don't stop the car because they want to see, you know, hey, it's me and Brown. | ||
| No, they want to see their president. | ||
| He had this understanding of that office was his temporarily, and he was everybody's president. | ||
| And I saw that in that car, and then I saw it one time in the Oval Office. | ||
| We were sitting, and the press office comes through with a gaggle of kids, and he stops the meeting entirely, and shows these kids, I mean, maybe sixth graders, seventh graders, shows them the Resolute Desk, and explains to them the history of the Resolute Desk. | ||
| And I'm sitting there, like, holy cow! | ||
| I could watch this all day long! | ||
| Then a third story. | ||
| It was the first presidential debate of the 2004 election. | ||
| He, Jeb, and I are in the car. | ||
| We've been at some hurricane center somewhere. | ||
| And Jeb turns to him and says, I think it's time for you to go to a hotel. | ||
| You need to. | ||
| You really need to bone up and study some. | ||
| Bush is like, nah, I'm gonna whip his ass. | ||
| He was kind of a jock. | ||
| He was kind of a frat boy. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Alone, he was kind of a frat boy. | |
| Jocular, funny, cracked jokes, you know, smarted off. | ||
| Never inappropriately, but just an ordinary human being. | ||
| So these two brothers get in a fight. | ||
| And I'm sitting in the jump seat facing the president like I am you, and Jeb's sitting there, and they're arguing about whether they should go back to the hotel or not, and Jeb looks at me and says, tell him. | ||
| And I'm like, I am not going to get in a fight between two brothers, one who's the governor of the swing state that we've got to win this election in, and the other guy happens to be the president of the United States and my boss. | ||
| I'm staying out of that fight, boys. | ||
| And what happened? | ||
| I stayed out of the fight, and Bush went to that first debate and lost big time to John Kerry. | ||
| Very well. | ||
| Well, listen, it's really been a pleasure talking to you. | ||
| I hope we cleaned up some of this stuff. | ||
| Did we hit everything that should have been hit on? | ||
| Are you kidding? | ||
| I mean, I know. | ||
| Four more days? | ||
| Yeah, yeah, yeah. | ||
| You've got to go do your radio show, not too far from here. | ||
| But I suspect we'll do this again. | ||
| I hope so, yeah, it was a pleasure. | ||
| Absolutely, oh, and by the way, I wanna mention, I'll talk to the people over here. | ||
| For those of you that follow us on Patreon, so many of you know that my dog Emma is a rescue from Hurricane Katrina, and she's got a really wonderful story. | ||
| So we did a video of Michael meeting Emma before, and I told her story, and that's on Patreon. |
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