| Wednesday, September 21, 2005 |
| Don't mess with the general |
I have to admit, I love this guy Lt. Gen. Honore. The Army's definitely going to have to put another star on his lapel once this whole Katrina thing cools down ... In his latest exploits, the new "Ragin Cajun" (sorry James Carville) dresses down a reporter (and the right goes wild...!)
The set up: Honore jumps in as he and Mayor Nagin are being peppered with reporters' questions about the plan to stage Hurricane Rita evacuations from the notorious convention center. The Lt. General just told the reporter that there are enough buses and that they're prepped and ready to go. He wants to talk about the Rita plan, the reporter wants to talk about what went wrong during Katrina. Take it away, reporter (courtesy of RadioBlogger):
Male reporter: General, a little bit more about why that's happening this time, though, and did not have that last time...
Honore: You are stuck on stupid. I'm not going to answer that question. We are going to deal with Rita. This is public information that people are depending on the government to put out. This is the way we've got to do it. So please. I apologize to you, but let's talk about the future. Rita is happening. And right now, we need to get good, clean information out to the people that they can use. And we can have a conversation on the side about the past, in a couple of months.... The Political Teen has the video, in case you just can't resist a glimpse of press chastisement.
Stated for the record, I think that after getting off to an abysmal start in the first 24 hours, in which they portrayed the desperate left-behinds in New Orleans as a band of looting, rampaging savages, the media recovered quickly and have since done an outstanding job of covering Katrina and its aftermath. Once they're common sense and humanity kicked in, in my opinion, thanks in large part to people like Tony Zumbado, the NBC photojournalist who basically broke the convention center horror show, Anderson Cooper at CNN and singer Harry Connick Jr., who acted as a freelance correspondent of sorts for NBC (plus Keith Olbermann, and of course, the heroic Times-Picayune...) they've covered the story fairly and thoroughly.
However... there are times when reporters can be a pain in the neck, asking just the wrong question at just the right time ... although I'll bet they won't do it to Honore again any time soon...
What's interesting is that General Honore has emerged as the one truly iconic figure in the rudderless Katrina response. He has asserted the most visible leadership, and proved to be the most durable, interesting character. Don't think for a moment that both the left and the right aren't trying to figure out what political party he belongs to (the White House is falling all over itself to get Bush next to the guy).
Tags: katrina, hurricane katrina, General Honore, Honore, New Orleans, Louisiana, media |
posted by JReid @ 3:20 PM   |
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