Radio Talk Show Host Michael Graham Takes On FEMA, the Government and the Media After Hurricane Katrina

Despite being forced out by Washington radio station WMAL-AM for refusing to soften his description of Islam as a “terrorist organization,” radio talk show host Michael Graham held nothing back in his recent interview with the Center for Individual Freedom’s Corporate Counsel, Renee Giachino.  In his self-appointed position as spokesman for the vast right-wing conspiracy, Graham discusses his article “Hurricane Katrina: The ‘K’ Stands for ‘Klan,’” former FEMA Director Michael Brown’s role and the liberal media’s transgressions.

What follows are excerpts from the interview for the radio program “Your Turn — Meeting Nonsense with Common Sense” that aired on WEBY 1330 AM, Northwest Florida’s Talk Radio.

GIACHINO:  My next guest is best known as a conservative radio talk show host and former GOP political consultant.  He has described himself as a “right-wing nut job.”  He recently was a guest host on KFI-AM in Los Angeles and you can listen to him weekdays at noon on www.rightalk.com.  Please welcome radio host Michael Graham.

GRAHAM:  Thank you for having me, I really appreciate it.

GIACHINO:  Thank you for coming on with us.  Michael, in the wake of Hurricane Katrina — and that is pretty much what I want to focus on in the short time that we have together this afternoon — you were one of the first conservatives, if I can classify you that way…

GRAHAM:  You certainly can.  Many, many people have.

GIACHINO:   Okay.  One of the first conservatives in America calling for President Bush to fire FEMA Director Michael Brown.  Why?

GRAHAM:  Well, because the way the bureaucracy has to work, given that there is no private sector competition, to determine whether you are doing a good job or bad is that you have to have politicians hold bureaucrats accountable for what happens on their watch.  Sometimes, arbitrarily so.  If you are the head of FEMA and you have the worst disaster response of any head of FEMA ever, and you put Americans in the unique position of watching people die of dehydration on television because the camera crews are in the middle of New Orleans but your FEMA crews are not, then you have to be fired.

In fact, firing is not enough.  I think President Bush really handled this the wrong way by first pulling Michael Brown off the job.  That is embarrassing because it says, “You are too dumb to do the job, but I am too dumb to fire you.”  And then finally Michael Brown resigned.  No, he should have been taken out onto the front lawn of the White House, stripped to his underwear, sent to New Orleans on a flat-bottom boat and told, “Row to Mexico buddy you are never going to work in the United States again.”  That is what should have happened because that is what the American people deserve from our political system when things go so wrong.

GIACHINO:  In an earlier interview on the program with Jim McCarthy, who you may know from McCarthy Communications, a crisis PR expert, and he basically said, although not as poignantly as you just did, that there has not been enough accountability here, and for Michael Brown to have been relieved of his duties in New Orleans and then to resign was not enough.

GRAHAM:  What it says, and this goes back — well, let me say that I am a fan of President Bush and I have been presently surprised by his presidency.  I think that on the issue of the War on Terror and national security, up until this moment, he has gotten it.  But when it comes to Katrina, he just did not get it.

Katrina is a national security issue.  We need to be secure not just from our enemies, but also from natural disasters like Katrina.  President Bush believes that loyalty is the ultimate virtue.  Now loyalty is a virtue, but it is not the only one.  I like competence.  I like people who can get their job done.  On September 11th, the head of the CIA should have been fired immediately, not because George Tenet could have done something to stop it, but simply because it was on his watch.  President Bush needed to send a message to the other bureaucrats that, if something this horrific happens on their watch, they will be held responsible so they had better go to bed every night thinking about how they are going to stop it and get up every morning trying to implement your plan.

When you let people keep their jobs under these circumstances, you end up with what we had in FEMA — unqualified people in political appointed jobs not getting the job done and not being held accountable.  And the result this time, sadly, was tremendous harm to the people of Louisiana, Alabama and Mississippi.

GIACHINO:  And it was the loyalty that got him into the position.  I know that I was very surprised when I learned Michael Brown’s credentials.

GRAHAM:  Did he have some?  I did not know he had any credentials.  He was head of a horse show association and an unaccomplished attorney.  You look at the difference — let me give you two good examples — the difference between him and John Roberts.  John Roberts may well be the most qualified nominee to the Supreme Court in my lifetime.  The guy, from a resume and experience and temperament standpoint, he has got it all.  Compare that to Michael Brown and you see why Michael Brown should never have had the job.

Now you compare President Bush’s performance in Katrina to Mayor Rudy Giuliani’s performance for September 11th and I think that is the gap that Americans are responding to.  We saw the trucks roll in on Friday after three days of embarrassing pictures that portrayed America almost like a Somalia or a Guatemala.  We were embarrassed by those images of our fellow Americans suffering and it took until Friday for us to react.  A President Giuliani would have been at the lead of those trucks on Tuesday or Wednesday solving those problems and saying to the bureaucrats that he did not care what paperwork did not get filled out, we are going to go in and get these people because they need us.

GIACHINO:  I know some people will say that Michael Brown is just the fall-guy.  No doubt, he probably does deserve, and you made a great case for why he does deserve, some of that blame.  Who else is to blame?

GRAHAM:  Well, I have written quite extensively about this and you can read a column at MichaelGraham.com, obviously the Mayor of New Orleans is one of the most incompetent political nitwits that I have ever seen in my life.  And he has no shame at all about it.  When Dateline NBC asked him why he did not use the buses that he had sitting there to evacuate tens of thousands of people, he said, “I don’t know, ask someone else.”  Hey pal, who do you suggest I ask?  And when I ask them, can I also ask them why you refused to use your own evacuation plan?  Why you decided months before Katrina that your policy was going to be we are going to let these people try to evacuate themselves.  And maybe when I find this mysterious person to ask why Mayor Nagin did not do his job, why he is sending his police force on a taxpayer funded trip to Las Vegas for crying out loud.

This is bizarre.  It is almost like a parody of that television commercial: “Hey Mayor Nagin, your city just failed its ultimate test.  Five hundred of your police officers did not show up when they were most needed, the results were dead people in the streets, what are you going to do now?”  “Well I am going to go to Disney World.”  It is humiliating.

And so I would start with Mayor Nagin.  And then I go to the Governor and then on up the line and eventually you reach Michael Brown and President Bush.

GIACHINO:  Let’s go one step further — I’m not sure if it’s forward or backward actually, it may depend on your perspective.  There have been a lot of calls for a federal probe of the governmental response to Katrina; some are raising questions about the media response, noting that many journalists became self-righteous windbags and hotdogs in their exploitation of the hurricane aftermath.  Do you think the media possibly made the situation worse through exaggerated and sensationalized coverage?

GRAHAM:  The death toll number appears to be wildly off.  The death toll number had 10,000 widely reported.  But again, where did that number come from?  That genius New Orleans Mayor, Ray Nagin.  I think that despite a few overwrought performances by Geraldo Rivera — but come on, everyone already knew Geraldo Rivera was a nut already so I don’t think anyone takes him seriously — I think the media has done a fine job.  How do you hold the media responsible for going into New Orleans, when they could, and taking pictures of people at the Super Dome of people who had just been beaten up, and they had.  Why don’t you hold responsible the Mayor who did not arrange to have police security at the Super Dome for the people he sent there, and the Governor who refused to send in the National Guard, day after day, when they were desperately needed?  So all the media did was show the failure of the system.  Of course you have the tear-jerkers, and Anderson Cooper flopping around like a televangelist, but the ultimate point was right — the government had a job to do, and on a basic job — don’t let people die of dehydration in a major American city — the government failed.

GIACHINO:  Do you think there is a campaign to play partisan and racial politics with this natural disaster?

GRAHAM:  Of course.  This is America and everything is partisan politics.  And sadly in the modern area, everything is racial politics.  I thought I had seen the low when reparations activist Randall Robinson claimed that black people had been forced into cannibalism by the Bush Administration at the Super Dome.  I thought that was the low.

And then I saw a black reporter ask former President Bush and former President Clinton, “What is your response to rumors that the levee was intentionally breached.”  And it turns out, and I read this in The Washington Post, that there were black activists selling the idea that boatloads of TNT were floated into New Orleans after the hurricane to blow up the levees because they did not fail and this is all part of President Bush’s plan to kill black people.  It’s so insane; it is hard to take seriously.  What’s scary to me is the number of people who do in fact take it seriously.

GIACHINO:  Well, it’s interesting because I, too, heard the story that some people believe that the levees were intentionally blown up.  But you know the version that I heard was that it was actually the Mayor and local folks who blew it up because they were afraid that they were not going to get enough money if there was not some major disaster.

GRAHAM:  See, all of this stuff — particularly playing the race card, the idea that the Louisiana National State Guard and the Louisiana Homeland Office did not let the Red Cross trucks and the Salvation Army trucks in because they wanted more dead black people — is ridiculous.  Now it is true that they did not let the trucks in and it is true that they screwed up, but many of those Louisiana National Guardsmen are black and Hispanic themselves.  So it is just ridiculous to think that they are going to be part of some secret KKK plot.

This is my message to black Americans who feel that the government at the city, state or federal level failed them in Katrina.  It is kind of like going to Denny’s and then filing a lawsuit because you got lousy service.  You know what?  Everybody gets lousy service at Denny’s.  Denny’s exists because drunks need to get a place to get a Grand Slam Breakfast at three o’clock in the morning.

The same with the government.  The government failed, but it failed everybody.  The helicopters did not go in and look and see black faces and turn around and fly away.  The Mayor failed us, the Governor failed us and FEMA failed us.  And it failed us all together.  In this abuse of the government we are all equal in the eyes of the government.  The government failed us all.

GIACHINO:  You recently authored an article titled “Katrina: The ‘K’ stands for ‘Klan.’”  I did not find the article on your website, MichaelGraham.com, but I am sure that it is there, as well.

GRAHAM:  It is.

GIACHINO:  I found it on another site.

GRAHAM:  It is everywhere.  And it really has hit a nerve.  It is me on behalf of the vast right-wing conspiracy, quote confessing end quote that, yes, in fact they are right — Katrina was developed in a lab run by Halliburton and unleashed on the Gulf Coast to disrupt oil supply and send prices up and to kill black voters on behalf of the Bush Administration.

And what I do is I take all of the psycho conspiracy theories used by the race-baiters for their own political agenda and I try to take them seriously, and the result, I hope, is comedy.  It seemed pretty funny to me.

GIACHINO:  And it is pretty funny.  What I wanted to ask you about is that at the end of the article, the site that I visited encouraged the readers to let them know what they think.  Have you seen any e-mail responses?

GRAHAM:  Oh yes, I have gotten plenty of e-mails and responses, and I have had e-mails, I’m sorry to say, from angry black people who claimed I am not taking this seriously and they “know” — and that is the part that scares me, when they say they “know” — that the Bush Administration is trying to kill them, that they “know” that George Bush hates black people.  And when I say give me your evidence of that, they always say they don’t need evidence because they “know.”

Well, that is not evidence, that is just bigotry.  That is just prejudice.  It is just as rational as someone saying, “I know black people are lazy” or “I know Hispanic people are whatever.”  Of course you don’t know that.  Where are the facts?

And so what we have done, sadly in the current attitude of political correctness and multi-culturalism, we have decided that certain groups of our neighbors and friends are not going to be required to meet the standard of reason.  So when a reporter actually asked the Congressional Black Caucus whether they thought that Katrina was an example of black genocide, nobody stood up and said: “Excuse me are you a nut?  What are you with, the Weekly World News?  What are you writing this article for this mother ship that is hovering over Chicago waiting for Louis Farrakhan?”

Nobody asked that question because there is this soft bigotry of low expectations — well, she’s just black, that’s how they feel, and they can’t be reasonable and rational so we will just leave her alone.  What a racist, condescending attitude!  And I am afraid that is the attitude that the press has against some of these allegations against President Bush regarding racism.

GIACHINO:  Michael, I want to talk now about all this finger-pointing that we have seen.  You have given us great reason to believe that it just doesn’t point at President Bush but that there are a lot of local and state officials who seem to have proven themselves inept in preparedness.

What about Congress?  Will the finger ever point back at member of Congress?

GRAHAM:  I don’t think so, and I think there are two reasons.  One, is this is truly an administrative issue.  In other words, Congress’ job is to fund FEMA and fund Homeland Security, and it really is up to the administrators to use that funding to come up with strategies.

The second thing is that the finger pointing at groups rarely works.  You need a person to point the finger at.  The fact is that Michael Brown surrounded himself with two other key aides who also were just as clueless on emergency management as he was.  And so they really failed as a team.  And he is the head. As President Bush said, “The buck stops here.  I am in charge, the federal government failed and I accept that responsibility.”  So that is how things always work.  And that is why you will not see Congress singled out.

I will say, interestingly, I was in South Carolina doing talk radio when Hurricane Floyd hit, and the state organized the largest peace-time evacuation in the state’s history and also the worst evacuation.  People spent 15-20 hours in their cars as the hurricane hit because they had been ordered onto already overcrowded roads by the Governor.  People were sitting in their cars saying that it was stupid and why did you lie to me and say that the roads were clear, which is what the Governor did.  Afterward, he said he just thought that would be safer and that everyone should have evacuated.  Well, that was idiotic.  People actually died in their cars — two people did.  It took 7-8 hours to go 40-50 miles.  And that Governor ran for Governor again that next year and was defeated, in part because of frustration over how he handled Hurricane Floyd.

I think that you are going to see political consequences — certainly at the governor’s mansion in Louisiana, as well as at the county level and city level.

GIACHINO:  And I think we may in fact see some change as well — if what I have read in the Wall Street Journal is true, we may see some repercussions in Congress.  One thing that I did not know, that the Wall Street Journal reported this week, is that Congress refused FEMA’s request for nearly $100 million this year to improve preparedness for catastrophes like Katrina?

GRAHAM:  You also need to know this.  They did approve $194 million for an Army Corps of Engineers project in Louisiana at the request of Senator Mary Landrieu, which is a total pork-barrel project, every penny of that could have gone to the levee system.  You also need to know that the levee that failed was, in fact, the most recently repaired and upgraded levee.  It was upgraded in the mid ’90s.  So the fact is that we have spent the money.  The problem is that local politicians spent it on pork and then the work that they did do was substandard.  I think that you are going to see an investigation into whoever did that work, and it may be the case that they used inferior materials.  This will be a classic example, and shock to everyone who knows Louisiana politics, of corruption.  I’m shocked.

GIACHINO:  Let me ask you this: You are now on the radio in Hurricane Alley, a designation we don’t take fondly to.  Almost one year ago to this day, Ivan crashed ashore and destroyed my home and many others belonging to our listeners and neighbors.  FEMA responded.  I cannot tell you what day it was that I first saw a FEMA representative there, but I do know that it was not the first or second day following the hurricane.  And let me tell you this about FEMA.  When they did come, it was when they did not have to risk their lives because of all the standing water and downed power lines.  And once FEMA did come in, it was to offer me financial assistance and not to help me clean the scum of the earth out of my home.  I am proud of the way the people here in Escambia and Santa Rosa counties rolled up their sleeves and got to work to help themselves and their neighbors instead waiting for a government hand-out.

GRAHAM:  You are absolutely right.  And when the people ask why it was so bad in Louisiana as compared to Florida, one reason is because Florida state and local officials did a much better job and so FEMA did not need to come in as the paratroopers to rescue everybody.

And the second reason is the character of the people.  And this is an undeniable fact of life.  The character of the people of New Orleans was demonstrated by their failures in the face of this hurricane.  This hurricane did not create looters.  The looters were already there.  The hurricane merely gave them the opportunity to loot.

I was in Richmond, Virginia, when Hurricane Isabel hit a couple of years ago and people were without electricity for up to a month and without water in some places for weeks.  There were virtually no reports of looting and certainly no reports of widespread looting.  And that is because of the character of the people involved.  And that is in my opinion undeniable and inescapable.

GIACHINO:  Well, Michael, thank you so much for your thoughts today in the wake of Hurricane Katrina.  You can listen to Michael everyday at noon on www.rightalk.com.  Thank you for being with us.

GRAHAM:  Thank you.