Bobby Jindal in his response to Obama speech tonight, told a story, his own personal experience, of how bureaucrats stopped rescue boats from going into New Orleans after Katrina. He used it as an example that government doesn't work, even in a disaster.
Problem is, he was lying about this being his personal experience. Details below the fold.
Note: I wasn't implying that the boats were not there. We all know (and saw) the heroic rescue efforts by volunteer boats. I was questioning whether Jindal was there as he claimed. See Update II.
Update III on the bottom. Some people are giving Jindal more benefit of the doubt than I do, arguing that it is possible for Jindal to make a day trip to NO. In fact, he did make a trip to NO airport to appear with GWB on TV on Sept 2. But in an earlier telling (see Update III), he claimed that he heard it from a sheriff.
Update IV: User machu's comment at the bottom for an opposing view.
Final Update: BarbinMD's diary here is the final nail in the coffin. Jindal lied. Case closed.
Here is the part of Jindal's speech about Katrina
Today in Washington, some are promising that government will rescue us from the economic storms raging all around us.
Those of us who lived through Hurricane Katrina, we have our doubts.
Let me tell you a story.
During Katrina, I visited Sheriff Harry Lee, a Democrat and a good friend of mine. When I walked into his makeshift office I’d never seen him so angry. He was yelling into the phone: ‘Well, I’m the Sheriff and if you don’t like it you can come and arrest me!’ I asked him: ‘Sheriff, what’s got you so mad?’ He told me that he had put out a call for volunteers to come with their boats to rescue people who were trapped on their rooftops by the floodwaters. The boats were all lined up ready to go - when some bureaucrat showed up and told them they couldn’t go out on the water unless they had proof of insurance and registration. I told him, ‘Sheriff, that’s ridiculous.’ And before I knew it, he was yelling into the phone: ‘Congressman Jindal is here, and he says you can come and arrest him too!’ Harry just told the boaters to ignore the bureaucrats and start rescuing people.
There is a lesson in this experience: The strength of America is not found in our government. It is found in the compassionate hearts and enterprising spirit of our citizens
Really? Did this really happen? Let's see what Jindal was saying in August-September of 2005, during the Katrina disaster.
Katrina hit when Congressman Jindal was returning from a foreign trip. His family evacuated to Baton Rouge, and met up with Jindal at his parents' home. Two days after Katrina passed, Jindal took an aerial tour of the disaster area. It is not clear when he went back on ground. But it is highly unlikely that he was there during first few days. When did he go to this Sheriff's office?
Jindal was interviewed frequently by the media during Katrina. If something like this happened, it would be highly unusual for Jindal to keep quiet and not talk about it when he was interviewed. Here is a transcript of CNN interview on Sept 1.
Congressman Bobby Jindal is a representative who has -- his district is actually Kennar, but all part of the general area of New Orleans.
As you look at those live pictures of your city, you've seen it in person, having flown over it. What was that like, flying over your district and seeing it inundated?
......
JINDAL: Absolutely. They're beginning to evacuate cases -- not beginning. They've been evacuating cases, for example, from Children's Hospital. The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services has identified thousands of beds where these patients can be taken to. Here in Baton Rouge they've stopped admitting non-life threatening cases so they can take the patients from New Orleans. There are literally convoys of doctors and nurses traveling into the region to relieve those doctors.
At least on Sept 1, he hasn't been there on the ground in person. He was still in Baton Rouge. And later in the interview he said,
Now, some of it is the scale of the catastrophe and that, you know, it's hard, you know, when you -- it's hard to plan for something on that massive of a scale in terms of the storm.
But really at this point, I don't think it's time to be critical of the state's efforts or the federal efforts while they're rescuing people off roofs, while they're picking people up out of the water. I think it's important they rescue every single person. I think it's important that while there are people's lives are in danger, that they get them away.
No complaints from Jindal at this time. Later, presumably after he had gone back and visited his district, he wrote an opinion piece on WSJ blasting "Deadly Bureaucracy" during Katrina. The piece was published on Sept 8, 2005. In this piece, he listed some examples,
• A mayor in my district tried to get supplies for his constituents, who were hit directly by the hurricane. He called for help and was put on hold for 45 minutes. Eventually, a bureaucrat promised to write a memo to his supervisor.
• Evacuees on a boat from St. Bernard Parish could not find anyone to give them permission to dock along the Mississippi River. Security forces, they say, were prepared to turn them away at one port.
• A sheriff in my district office reported being told that he would not get the resources his office needed to do its job unless he emailed a request. The parish was flooded and without electricity!
• Unbelievably, first responders were hindered by a lack of interoperable communications. Do you recall how New York police and fire departments on 9/11 could not talk with each other? Four years later, despite billions spent on homeland security, state, federal, and local officials in Louisiana had the same problem.
There was a sheriff, and there was a boat. But the sheriff and the boat were not in the same story. If he had not met Sheriff Harry Lee by now, Harry Lee was not going to rescue anybody.
Governor Jindal, if all you can find to support your opinion are lies, you need to question the validity of your opinion.
Update: Thanks for the rec's. Kudos to Fixed Point Theorem who points out that very conveniently for Jindal's "story", Harry Lee happens to not be available for comment. He passed away of leukemia in 2007.
Here is the wiki entry for Harry Lee. The Katrina part:
Sheriff Lee maintained a strong presence during Katrina. Most memorably, the morning before Katrina hit New Orleans, Lee appeared on emergency radio, with a message for those who had not yet evacuated: "You better haul ass! Y'all should have left yesterday." The previous evening, he had let the community know that his birthday party had been cancelled.
Lee was one of the few New Orleans politicians to maintain his pre-Katrina popularity. During the storm, Parish President Aaron Broussard evacuated all Parish personnel directly under his control to St. Tammany Parish on the Northshore, including the drainage pump operators. This is widely considered the primary cause of flooding on the Eastbank of Jefferson Parish. However, the Sheriff's Office in Jefferson Parish is independent of the Parish President and operates directly under an elected Sheriff.
When storm conditions dissipated, Jefferson Parish deputies immediately began patrolling all major commercial roads and even individual neighborhoods in the Parish. Most of the Parish at this time had been evacuated, and communications were nearly non-existent. Parish deputies were the only form of security in the Parish in the first week after the storm.
Most of the looting that did take place in Jefferson Parish occurred in Terrytown and Gretna, which borders on Algiers and the Crescent City Connection. The Jefferson Parish Sheriff's Office has jurisdiction over all of unincorporated Jefferson Parish, while incorporated cities such as Gretna, Kenner, Harahan and Westwego have their own independent city governments and police departments. In the first week after the storm, Gretna police officers were accused of preventing New Orleans evacuees from crossing the Crescent City Connection (Outside their jurisdiction) in an effort to prevent looting. It should be noted however, that Gretna officers did not block the actual Crescent City Connection (bridge), but attempted to prevent entry into Gretna city limits from exits leading into their city. This action has been praised by Gretna residents but criticized by many Orleans Parish elected officials. As the Gretna Police Department is independent of the Sheriff's Office, Lee bears no responsibility for these actions.
No boat story here. It's quite possible that Jindal is trying to play off Harry Lee's popularity in New Orleans.
Update II: Thanks to only51and218matter, here is the linkon what really happened.
Wednesday, August 30, 2005. Early Wednesday morning at 6:00 a.m. Gautreaux and his citizen flotilla volunteers arrived in New Orleans and rendezvoused with Captain Clark and his Wildlife and Fisheries agents who had set up headquarters at the Clearview Shopping Center at the junction of Clearview Parkway and I-10.
At this time, Bobby Jindal was still in Baton Rouge.
Although hundreds of volunteer's boats eventually received search and rescue assignments that morning from the DWFE and taken to critical areas throughout the flood zone of New Orleans and St. Bernard Parish through circuitous and hazardous routes, some volunteers were turned away because their houseboats, party barges, and deep draft boats were too big or unsafe for a rescue mission. And some volunteers simply waited so long to get an assignment they decided to go back home.
Chaos and frustrations of a rescue mission. But can you blame it on bureaucrats?
From multiple comments (numerous links in the comments) it is clear the Sheriff Harry Lee was involved in an effort to get boats into New Orleans on Aug 30-31. Also there seems to be a misprint of the dates in some of the printed stories. Thus we can only ascertain that the possible range of the dates of the boat volunteer story to be between Aug 30 and Aug 31. Harry Lee stayed in greater New Orleans throughout the disaster. It is also clear from records of multiple TV interviews of Bobby Jindal that he was in Baton Rouge at least until after Sept 1. So Jindal could not possibly have "walked into his makeshift office" in greater New Orleans. End of proof.
Update III: Here is how Jindal's story evolved over time:
Aug. 2007, the first time this story appeared on the web (as far as I can find),
"A lot of foolish things happened following the storm," Jindal said. "We all remember the horror stories.
"People were still in the water. Numerous heroes rushed down with boats to rescue them, but then the bureaucrats got involved. They said if you don't have proof of registration and insurance, you're not allowed to go into the water.
"People were drowning, and they were worried about paperwork. Look, if I'm drowning, I don't care if you steal the boat, I hope you come and get me."
Notice Jindal didn't claim any personal role in this.
Feb. 2008
Contrast that with the
bureaucracy. I witnessed the
frustration of the local law
enforcement officials. At one
point, volunteers were rushing
in boats, to come and pick up
people out of the water. Some
bureaucrat decided that they
couldn’t go in the water —
turned away even sheriff’s
deputies because he said they
didn’t have the right paper-
work. He said if you don’t bring
proof of insurance and registra-
tion, you can’t go in the water
to rescue. That is the kind of
inane absurdity of the bureau-
cracy. You saw that in the recov-
ery and the rebuilding efforts as
well. The $75,000 trailers, the
$175 plastic tarps.
Hmm, a passive witness?
May 2008
Jindal told me, "There are thousands of these stories. I talked to a sheriff in an area where they had people with boats that were ready to go in the water and rescue people and they were turned away because they didn’t have proof of registration and insurance, they didn’t bring the right paperwork. The bureaucracy was just awful."
Heard from the sheriff, not seen with his own eyes. This is probably closer to the truth.
Update IV: Per user machu:
I just read it, but there is a second Sheriff who played prominently with Jindal, Jack Stephens from Chalmette, Louisiana, in St. Bernard Parish, Jindal did a lot to help them. The boat rescuers were being blocked from his parish (they are on the east side of New Orleans, directly next to the lower 9th Ward.) They were isolated for days, without any help, worse than New Orleans. The update fits exactly to the Jack Stephens story, not the Harry Lee story. (I'm not trying to be difficult, but the Katrina misinformation was flagrant and was never corrected, and I see some of that here as references.) BTW I can't believe I'm the only resident, a Democrat, who is aware of all this, posting here, which I found through HuffPo where I'm a regular,particularly on New Orleans and Katrina.
So, given the Jack Stephens story, and the errors in the media previously, I don't believe proves that Jindal changed his story at all. Newell Normand or any other top official in the Sheriff's office can accurately prove it. Nonetheless, I drove daily between New Orleans and Baton Rouge with law enforcement, and he had much better and easier access to Jefferson Parish and Lee than I did; I'm a nobody, and still no fan of Jindal.
But we're tied by Katrina, that's all.
Final Update: Quoting BarbinMD who quoted Kj, this was Harry Lee on Larry King:
LEE: I fully believe that when then matter is looked into, we tried to get some boats in the water early on ... Those boats where not allowed to get into the water when they were needed and I just found out about seven days later one of the reason boats couldn't get in was they didn't have enough life preservers and some of them didn't have proof of insurance.
How did Jindal know what Lee didn't know until seven days later? Liar.