Since the mid-1960’s, I have interacted with six Louisiana Governors—John McKeithen, Edwin Edwards, David Treen, Buddy Roemer, Mike Foster and Kathleen Blanco. My relationships ranged from casual to friendly to downright hostile. Edwin Edwards falls into the hostile category. After a couple of exposés that failed to meet his approval, he anointed me with the label, “derelict gunslinger.” The title refers to my checkered past and occupation as a muckraker.

I’ve never met Governor Smarty Pants, aka Bobby Jindal. Not there haven’t been opportunities. When he isn’t travelling across the country to raise campaign funds, promote himself as a potential national GOP candidate for something (preferably the Presidency and/or Vice Presidency), he is either searching for television cameras, giving his Jesus testimony in churches or passing out medals to military veterans, which is the Governor’s latest publicity ploy. He needs to adopt a campaign slogan of “Anywhere but Baton Rouge.”

I’m a four-year military veteran—a partially disabled veteran, in fact, as a result of being to close to jet aircraft and loud explosions. But despite tales I told barroom buddies in my drinking days long ago, the hearing loss I suffered did not involve great heroics. I deserved no extra medals then. Or now. Nonetheless, thanks for the offer, Governor. But I pass. The money can be better utilized keeping you in the Capitol figuring out ways to stop Louisiana’s descent to the status of a third world country.

The “third world”  analogy is not original. It was recently used by my former television colleague Barry Erwin, now head of the Council for a Better Louisiana. His remarks related to the Governor’s unending demands for slashing education budgets. From pre-school to college and beyond, the future is bleak. The only ray of sunshine is the LSU Tigers, which for many people is more important anyway. But that could change after football season opens this coming Saturday, meaning that the burden is on Coach Les Miles to give Louisianans something to brag about.

To quote our President, “Let me be perfectly clear.” I have not a clue of how  to deal with Louisiana’s financial dilemma. But it seems that Governor Smarty Pants could offer a plan better than cut, slash and eliminate. After all, the guy is an Ivy League educated Rhodes Scholar. And that may be the problem. More than any Louisiana Governor I’ve known, there seems to be a disconnect between Jindal, the legislature and the people who elected him.

Instead of focusing on the state’s financial problems during the most recent legislative session, the Governor stalked television cameras on the gulf coast. Throughout the efforts to deal with the BP oil spill catastrophe, he stepped before cameras on a daily basis to show-off his speed-talking skills. Some of his updates were barely comprehensible, but 24-hour cable news networks gave him the face time on national TV that he coveted.

Perhaps Governor Smarty Pant’s constant presence at the scene was helpful, but I haven’t figured out in what way. Certainly, his absence from Baton Rouge deprived the legislature of any kind of leadership. The only measure that seemed to remotely interest the administration was maintaining as much secrecy as possible with respect to Governor’s office. Come to think of it, Jindal might be positioning himself for a CIA appointment.

Whether Kathleen Blanco could have done a better job in handling the state’s financial crisis is an unknown. Given her background as a teacher and her interest in the state’s education system, I’m guessing she would have been far more aggressive in protecting Louisiana’s academic programs. Unfortunately, though, Hurricane Katrina did her in—unfairly maybe.

Katrina’s impact on Blanco falls under my heading of reporting that I never completed. In 2006, I did preliminary research for a Dallas, Texas production company that was in the early stages of a proposed movie length Katrina documentary. As it turned out, the project was too little, too late. Spike Lee’s HBO documentary was already in production.

Before the the Dallas group abandoned its project, I reviewed a lot of material, and spent time with Governor Blanco and several Administration officials. I came away under the  impression that she was the victim of circumstances such as the storm altering its course overnight after many residents refused to evacuate, levees giving way, news reporters playing “gotcha” and politicians trying to divert blame for their dereliction of duties on others.

At my first meeting with Governor Blanco, she made the point that if the levees protecting New Orleans had held, the major story of 2005 would have been Rita—the devastating hurricane that struck southwestern Louisiana a few weeks after Katrina. Although the force of Katrina inflicted heavy damage on the area, it was the flood that caused most of the devastation.

Regardless, Blanco was blamed for Corps of Engineers miscalculations, FEMA’s failures, and the tepid response to the tragedy by the Bush Administration. Because of the public’s perception of her “weakness” in responding to the storm, Blanco’s re-election chances diminished. Her departure from politics made it easy sailing for Bobby Jindal.

So far, Governor Smarty Pants has done a fine job getting on TV, visiting churches and presenting medals to old soldiers. One day, maybe he will get around to leading the state out of its crisis. 

My memoir, Odyssey of a Derelict Gunslinger, is available at amazon.com and independent bookstores. It offers much more than $19.99 worth of laughs. The book is an account of my illustrious (I choose the adjectives) career.

I’ll get to Rick Sanchez later in this post. But first, a few words about the testimony of BP President Tony Hayward this morning before the the U.S. House of Representatives Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations. As this is written more than one hour into the Congressional hearing, Hayward has yet to utter a word about his company’s massive blunders. Instead, committee members are giving their usual speeches—posturing and politicizing.

Chairman Bart Stupak began the hearing by droning on about its purpose. We know the purpose, for God’s sake. As the Democrat’s Senate nominee in Pennsylvania, he going to need a speech therapist before heading out on the campaign trail. But Stupak is downright dynamic compared to California Democrat Henry Waxman, who continues his campaign to become the most boring person ever elected to Congress. Today, he gave an endless recitation of every news story and revelation since the spill occured 50-plus days ago.

So far, however, the leading contestant in the sweepstakes for the most stupid comments is GOP Representative Joe Barton of Texas—a state that is not far behind South Carolina, Illinois and Louisiana in electing politicians, who require zippers on their mouths. Barton today accused President Obama of shaking down BP by pressuring the mega-corporation to commit a minimum of $20-billion dollars into an escrow fund to compensate the “small people” for the loss of their livlihoods and to pay for the damage inflicted on Gulf Coast seafood industry, marshes, beaches and wildlife. The use of the term, “small people,” was a gaffe by the Swedish speaking Chairman of BP’s board. He has since apologized and promised to also compensate medium and large people.

Anyway, Congressman Barton’s remarks were so dumb he broke my stupidity measuring scale. In addition to describing  the escrow fund as a “shakedown,” he actually apologized to BP for President Obama’s insistence that a fund be established to insure that Gulf Coast residents get paid for their losses. 

The loss of my stupidity measuring device is a setback because the Louisiana legislature launched a comeback yesterday to regain its title as the nation’s stupid politics champion. Lawmakers revived a bill that will allow concealed weapons in church. WWJP. What would Jesus pack.

That brings me to Rich Sanchez time. My Sanchez obsession is not personal. He’s probably a nice guy. Then the cameras light up and he represents everything that is wrong with television news. Sanchez is not a journalist. He is a performer playing the role of a journalist. It goes back to his days in Miami at the same local station where my career as a television investigative reporter began, which was a few years before Rick’s arrival on the scene. I learned of Rick’s style in one of those “You are not going to believe this guy” phone calls from a former colleague. I didn’t believe, but now do after watching his role playing CNN antics.

Remarkably, though, Sanchez got out-done this week by a substitute anchor on his afternoon program, Rick’s List. Sitting in for the vacationing Sanchez was Drew Griffin, CNN’s Senior “Investigative” Correspondent—a position I held for ten years, ten years ago (I know I could have said a “decade ago” to avoid repetition, but I like it the way I wrote it).

It’s probably impolite to criticize my successor. So what? I will do it anyway, motivated by ”investigative” reporter Griffin’s effort yesterday to go for the President’s jugular by repeating  a story that has been around for several weeks—namely that the White House tried to discourage two candidates from opposing Obama-favored hopefuls in Democratic primary elections in Colorado and Pennsylvania. Discussions about possible Administration jobs if the guys dropped out of the races wre described by Griffin as “Chicago-style  politics.” To re-enforce the characterization, he did a live interview with the Executive Director of Chicago’s Better Government Association, a watchdog group with an impeccable reputation for holding public officials accountable. Unfortunately for Griffin, the BGA representative refused to take the bait. Like every other non-partisan commentators, he described the contacts as a routine effort to maintain the Democratic majority in the Senate. Obama is, after all, the titular head of the party. Griffin’s frustration was visible as he rephrased his questions to elicit the anwer he wanted. Bad reporting, I thought. 

My criticism of Griffin is more an indictment of CNN for the network’s failure to hold him to a higher standard of journalism. My successor has blown other stories. Drew drew (man, I’m on a roll) wrong conclusions when he joined forces with former Louisiana Attorney General Charles Foti, who tried to win votes by politicizing Hurricane Katrina tragedies. Foti first accused  Dr. Anna Pou of killing elderly patients at Saint Rita’s hospital in New Orleans. While waiting or evacuation, she prescribed pain medicine to ease the suffering of terminally ill patients. A grand jury refused to indict her.

Griffin also jumped on Foti’s bandwagon in his investigative reports of the owners of a nursing home in which 35 residents died before rescuers got to them. The operators of the facility were eventually tried and exonnerated. And finally, Griffin was responsible for erroneous reports about voter registration fraud by ACORN, the African American political activist group that went into bankruptcy defending itself on a variety of allegations.

So the old codger strikes again. I know I sound like a world class whiner in criticizing CNN and its reporters. But the network has retreated to irrelevance. And that is unfortunate in an era when responsible television reporting is so badly needed. I guess I’m living in the past.  

Back to the congressional hearings. I need a good afternoon nap.

My memoir, Odyssey of a Derelict Gunslinger, is available at amazon.com and independent bookstores. It offers much more than $19.99 worth of laughs. The book is an account of my illustrious (I choose the adjectives) career.

Karl Rove can’t decide whether George W. Bush was a “great President, or the greatest,” to use Stephen Colbert’s satirical phrase. But according to “turd blossom”—one of the nicknames Bush assigned his senior advisor—the former President did a fine job reversing Bill Clinton gaffes of balancing budgets, paying down national debt and creating a prosperous economy.  

In Rove’s memoir, Courage and Consequence: My Life as a Conservative in the Fight, Bush made only one tiny mistake—invading Iraq on a false premise. But, heck, that was only because of faulty intelligence. And besides, it’s only cost the country 4000 lives and nearly a trillion dollars. In Rove’s view, the war is a minor stumble.

What about George Bush’s 9/11 reaction when he continued reading The Pet Goat (correct title, not “My Pet Goat” as frequently reported) to a second grade classroom after Andrew Card notified him that two airliners had crashed into the World Trade Center. Despite the panicked expression on the President’s face, Rove says Bush was simply trying to project a sense of calm. He didn’t want to cause a bunch of seven year old kids running from the room, screaming, “We’re all going to die.” 

And of course, there’s an explanation for President Bush’s slow response to Katrina and his infamous quote, “You’re doing a heckuva job, Brownie.” Rove writes that Bush’s praise of FEMA chief Michael Brown was based on information given him by others—people who apparently were ignorant of the disastrous failures of the federal government in providing assistance to New Orleans in the hours immediately following the hurricane. In Rove’s role as Bush apologist, he blames Louisiana Governor Katherine Blanco and New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin for the rescue debacle. Indeed, Rove believes Democrats are to blame for everything that’s wrong with the country. However,  Turd Blossom’s account of what happened before and after Katrina contradicts reality—at least based on my investigation.

In 2006, a Dallas, Texas television production company contacted me about working on a Katrina documentary that was being developed as a full length movie. Although the project ultimately fell through because of lack of financing, I devoted a lot of unpaid hours to interviewing state officials, first responders and gathering additional background.

“If the levees had held, the big hurricane story of 2005 would have been Rita, not Katrina,” Governor Blanco told me in a lengthy interview. Although Katrina’s winds and high water caused incredible damage and resulted in hundreds of casualties in Louisiana and Mississippi, it was the breach of the levees that flooded the New Orleans area and took the heaviest toll in terms of deaths and proprety damage. Poor construction and maintenance of the levees was the fault of the U.S. Corp of Engineers, rather than state and local government. It was a problem that should have been corrected many years before Katrina. No single administration can be blamed.

Much was made about the delay of state and local officials in declaring mandatory evacuation of New Orleans, a delay that was influenced in large part by the timetable of Katrina’s projected landfall and its intensity. The U.S. Weather Service determined the near certainty of the hurricane’s landfall between 12:00 a.m. and 7:00 a.m. Sunday morning, August 29th. Within three hours, mandatory evacuation began and the Superdome was opened as a shelter of last resort. But for many people, especially those in the 9th Ward, they were either unable or refused to evacuate.

Though not widely reported, one factor in the decision of many folks to ignore mandatory evacuation was a false alarm the year before when Hurricane Ivan threatened New Orleans. Thousands of residents heeded the warning in September 2004. Then, Ivan took a sharp turn in the Gulf and made landfall in Alabama. It gave a lot of  people a false sense of security that the so-called “big one” would not hit New Orleans in their lifetime.

I also need to mention Turd Blossom’s claim in his book that Bush’s slow response to Governor Blanco’s request for U.S. military help in the aftermath of Katrina was a result of her reluctance to give the President’s needed authority to send troops. Actually, he already had the authority—an exception being provisions of a post Civil War statute known as Posse Comitatus, which prohibits the use of active military for law enforcement. Troops can be used for other purposes without the consent of the state. Months after the hurricane, Blanco was praised by fellow governors for upholding the Posse Comitatus law of separating state and federal powers.  

Anyway, Karl Rove’s memoir meets expectations. After all, he is the “boy genius,” as George W. sometimes called him, the turd blossom responsible for getting Bush elected. Rove is entitled to false memories. Otherwise, he would have to take responsibility for achievement.