Written by Richard Rapaport   

It was the Presidential aside heard ‘round the world, following the August 2005 Air Force One flyover of flattened, post-Hurricane Katrina Louisiana. Objects on the ground seem to resolve themselves at 5,000 feet and after viewing the damage from on-high, America’s “in-the-bubble” Commander-in-Chief, lauded his bubble-boy director of the Federal Emergency Management Administration, Mike Brown, with those wrongheaded, unforgettable words; “… and Brownie, you’re doing a heckuva job.”

In front of a horror-stricken nation and a restive press corps, Bush lauded his Under-Secretary of Emergency Preparedness and Response who, in his dazed torpor, transformed “FEMA” into an acronymic for hopelessness, haplessness, helplessness, and the kind of political horsing around that led to Brown’s incongruous upgrade from head of the International Arabian Horse Association to FEMA Director.

Mercifully, “Brownie” was soon put out of our misery, relieved of FEMA command as the extent of New Orleans’s growing agony and the paltry, paralyzed response, became clear. As disaster morphed into catastrophe, Brown’s corpulent, doe-in-the-spotlight demeanor spoke more eloquently even than those fateful words about the response to Katrina that illustrated just how facilely a once-great nation can abandoned its own.

Yet, impossibly, unbelievably, last week, there was “Brownie,” the self-same Michael Dewayne Brown, poster-child for good-ole-boy, Bush-era dolor, returning for a rancid encore. After five years of semi-exile, “Brownie” seemed, at least in his own mind, to have ridden out the shame, atoning for his sins more or less quietly, if you don’t count his 7:00-10: p.m. right-wing radio talkfest on Denver’s KOA, 850 am. Yet some things never change, such as his proud trumpeting of congenital ignorance, which suggested that while “Brownie” may be a headless horseman, he is one still capable of toting up major face time on Fox, CNN and MSNBC. “Brownie” was back, and in full commentatorial flood, discoursing on the Gulf of Mexico oil spill with such pathologically dissociative suggestions as his comment, stated with a breathless absence of irony, that the Gulf oil spill “is like Katrina all over again, because people at the top are not paying attention.” Say what?

Forgiveness, even of the self-referential kind, can sometimes be a healthy diversion. But for Mike Brown to shamelessly flash his own culpability as some kind of golden ticket to pundit-hood was too loopy even for Chris Matthews, a commentator of the “give them enough rope” school of political discourse. Matthews listened intently before dismissing much of what Brown had to say as “insane.” In perfect “Brownie” fashion, however, a sly grin snaked across Mike Brown’s thick features as he admitted, “the way you said it sounds crazy to me, too.”

Clearly, “Brownie” could never claim to be the ripest Republican raspberry on George’s bush. But what exactly was he trying to prove during his recent spate of interviews, except perhaps the lack of judgment of cable news producers for even letting the man near a live microphone. In his interviews with Chris Matthews, Anderson Cooper and Neil Cavuto, Brown seemed to be inching towards the lunatic suggestion that Barak Obama had recently come out in favor of limited offshore oil drilling, so that when disaster struck, the President would be able to kill off the entire carbon energy business in America. The intimated, though never quite fully articulated allegation was that somehow, the Obama administration had its own evil motives and methods to blow up the British Petroleum drilling platform so that the President, according to Brown, could not only, “get rid of the oil and gas industry,” but also go on to “bankrupt the coal industry” as well. It was a bravura, zany line of reasoning, one seemingly more up Glenn Beck’s loony-tunes alley, but one with the built-in advantage of the deniability of having emanated from the mind of mad Mike Brown.

Could it be that in the face of a disaster weirdly resonant with Katrina that the Republican truth squad was able to convince an always-eager-to-please “Brownie” to test out a line of political thought that just might, in these paranoid times, provide fodder for the 2010 or 2012 elections. Or could it be that Brownie was simply trying to resurrect his bona fides to say, run the Department of Homeland Security in a Palen Administration? This may be a bit of a stretch, because of the Brown stain that is still association with Katrina. Yet Mike Brown’s performance may at least serve to remind us that disgraced political hacks don’t necessarily just fade away. Instead, they get invited back onto cable news to prove, as “Brownie” has, that he is “still doing a heckuva job,” even if it is not necessarily the one he signed up for.