Rep. William Jefferson (D-LA) Questions Brown?

RUSH: Now, we’ve got some audio sound bites from the Mike Brown FEMA hearings that are going on today, and we do have some questions here from Congressman William Jefferson (D-LA) who so far I think is about the only Democrat that’s been there. It’s hard to see any Democrats at this hearing. Now, Congressman William Jefferson (D-LA) was there. Maybe the Democrats ceded this responsibility to him, but what you need to know about this is that Mike Brown has given them hell this morning. He has told them in no uncertain terms it wasn’t FEMA’s responsibility to evacuate or establish law and order. He said his biggest mistakes were in failing to give enough press conferences and failing to get the mayor and governor to work together down there. You know, we’ve had a lot of conservatives over the past couple of weeks jump all over Mike Brown, just to make sure that the liberals out there think these conservatives are “reasonable,” and it’s frosted me. For example, let me just repeat something. For two days now, we have two consecutive stories: yesterday New Orleans Times-Picayune; today LA Times. We now know that it was a media scandal, the reporting of what was not going on in that town. There was no mass murdering. There were no mass rapes. None. Nothing of the sort was rapping at the Superdome or the convention center. Two days now we know this, and this has still not been corrected by the people that reported it, primarily on the cable news networks — all of them — and so one of the things that came up today at Mike Brown’s hearing, the FEMA hearing.
Well, it’s congressional Republicans conducting the hearing. Mike Brown said (summarized), “Look, I am FEMA. We are volunteers. We are unarmed. We aren’t law enforcement. We heard the media reports of the anarchy in the Superdome. We had buses ready to go. We were ready to evacuate those people, but I’m not sending those people into a war zone. I’m not sending people where there are murders taking place and where there are rapes taking place and there’s total anarchy. I’m not sending people in there to that.” Now, we know that none of that was happening. We know there was no anarchy in there. We know there were no mass rapes. There weren’t any rapes. There weren’t mass murders. There were six deaths in the Superdome, four at the convention center. Four of these deaths were natural causes. One was a suicide. I forgot what the other was, but there was nothing like we were told and all was going on in there. So could we say that Mike Brown could actually be honest? Say, “Look it. I believe the reporting that was going on in there. I can’t send in a bunch of volunteers who aren’t armed to go evacuate that place.” Well, none of that was happening. Who’s responsible then, ultimately? Could it perhaps be said that the media which was reporting all this hysteria, compounding rumor after rumor after rumor?

Again, folks, I have to tell you. Since the first days I started this program, the same media that followed up rumor after rumor after rumor by reporting it and amplifying it has been asking, “Well, you know, Limbaugh is a good entertainer, but he has no filter there. He’ll make things up. He’ll just put up whatever he wants to say if it fits his world view and makes the point he wants to make. You can’t trust Limbaugh. He’s a good entertainer but you can’t trust what he says.”
Then Drudge comes along and all the Internet people come along and the same mainstream media people say, “There’s no filter there,” meaning there’s no editor to check it out, check sources, double- and triple-source it. Where were the filters in New Orleans? So rumors spread about mass murder, rape, death, pillaging and all this, and yet it didn’t happen, and yet it was reported as though it did happen and were happening coupled with those pictures coming out of there, then the mass reporting of all the looting. In fact one of the New Orleans officials said in the Times-Picayune story yesterday that the number of murders that happened in the aftermath here in New Orleans was average. We have 200 murders a year here, and the number of murders that took place in the aftermath is about the same number of murders that would have taken place if there had been a hurricane!
So Mike Brown could say, “Look, I believed the media. I can’t send people in there who are not professionally trained and not law enforcement to evacuate a place where that kind of anarchy is going on.”
Folks, I’m telling you this has been a media scandal, and it’s not the first, and we “connect the dots.” Big term, right? We connect the dots. The same type of false, phony template-based reporting coming out of New Orleans and the aftermath of the hurricane is exactly what we’re getting out of Iraq. Remember: News is packaged like any product on the shelf, and it’s packaged by people who want to market it in certain ways to influence opinion in certain ways so that you will buy it.
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