Brown Believed Hurricane Katrina To Be Elaborate Joke, Leaked Emails Show
Ex-FEMA director Michael Brown was under the impression that Hurricane Katrina, or "Yeah-Right-Ina" as he called it, was actually the work of several Louisiana pranksters and thus did not warrant a serious response from him, as evidenced by new emails of his that have found their way into the press.
The emails, sent to various people on the days prior to, during, and after the hurricane, reflect Brown's desire to not let the jokesters get to him, and to just get on with living a dignified life.
"Tie or not for tonight?" he wrote to his press secretary, intent on not falling for the "disaster" by emailing her more pertinent questions. "Button down blue shirt?"
Others close to him realized the game as well, carrying on with pretending not to notice the fake victims, instead focusing on flirting with Brown.
"My eyes certainly must be deceiving me," wrote one blind female close to Brown. "You look fabulous -- and I'm not talking the makeup!"
"I got it at Nordstroms," Brown replied, thwarting the mischief-makers even as they attempted to divert his attention by pretending that a levee had broken, allowing more "water" into the city.
Sentences later, however, the sheer scale of the prank seemed to get to Brown, and he began to have second thoughts about the hardships of being FEMA director, a demanding job position that requires the ability to deal with pranks.
"Can I quit now?" he said, clearly affected by the sheer scale and magnitude of the joke. "Can I go home?"
Still, Brown did not go home, keeping up a brave and heroic front even in the face of being punked, continuing to send his staff emails on Tom Cruise and Katie Holmes, a horse that he had once judged, and a forward on "49 ways to please your man".
Although Brown later discovered that Katrina was not actually a joke and was a gigantic fucking disaster, he commented that in his defense, it "really did seem like a joke".
"Couldn't you just imagine like, five or six black kids putting this whole thing together?" he asked a House committee in September. "They'd all have walkie-talkies that they stole from somewhere, and they'd be like, 'Alpha team, go! Use a fog machine to make it look like flooding! That'll teach that jerk Mike Brown!'"
"I certainly think that the local and state governments really should've identified this as not a joke much sooner," he concluded.
But Brown shouldn't be terribly worried -- many believe that his leaked emails show his bravery and fortitude, and more than justify the $148,000 annual salary he still receives as a consultant for FEMA, where he is on the lookout for future disasters that might not actually be jokes.
"President Bush said it best: Brownie, you're doing a heck of a job," said one man enthusiastically. "Isn't that neat, that he has those little pet names for people?"
"I'll tell you what the real joke here is: the liberal media for trying to smear this crap all over the news," snarled another. "President Bush and his gang have had a hard enough week already. Can't they cut him some slack?"
