More Details on the St. Rita’s Drownings
Here are some items with some additional infromation about the tragic drownings at the St. Rita’s nursing home. From the Chicago Tribune: Nursing home gambled; residents paid the price. And from the LA Times: Haven turned to horror.
I’m still waiting for the mainstream media to connect the dots on this story with Jefferson Parish President Aaron Broussard’s tearful (and apparently fictional) account on Meet the Press of Tom Rodrigue’s phonecalls to his momma. If you missed my earlier obsessing about this, Broussard described phonecalls between Rodrigue and his mother on Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday. But Rodrigue’s mother apparently died on Monday. See Was Broussard telling the truth? and More detail on Tom Rodrigue’s mother.
September 16th, 2005 at 7:21 am
I still think it’s more likely that Rodrigue told Broussard, “yeah, someone’s going to get her” or, “I thought someone was going to get her every day until I found out on Friday that she was dead”
When you’ve just been through a disaster and you’re all emotional, you can get things confused. That’s why he wrote out the rest of his statement to Russert.
We’re human beings and we’re fallible. There’s a large difference between well planned out and orchestrated lies and off the cuff, emotionally distressed lies.
September 16th, 2005 at 2:54 pm
Yeah, that explanation sounds credible to me. And if you are correct, I wouldn’t characterize it as a lie, even an off-the-cuff, emotionally distressed lie, since by my definition a lie has to be intentional.
Still, I can’t see any reason to believe that your version is _more_ likely than the explanation that says Broussard was intentionally altering the story to make his plea for federal assistance sound stronger. Given that the guy is a politician, my assumption going in is probably going to be that he’s being dishonest. But I admit that I don’t really know, and may well never really know, what the truth is in this case.
September 18th, 2005 at 12:37 am
I think we need some comments from Senator Kennedy on the subject of drowning.
September 19th, 2005 at 4:18 pm
Finally MSNBC has connected the dots and realized Aaron Broussard was wrong, why it took NBC and the rest of the press so long to unravel this story is still a little interesting. The lie intention or not, at this time will be impossible to prove one way or another. In my opinion it was a lie and an intention one to shift blame from the local officials to FEMA.
How did Mr. Broussard mixed up the facts is just not plausible remember Mr. Broussard whole theme was FEMA was the problem so mixing up the fact that the story unfold BEFORE the Hurricane to AFTER the Hurricane worked in his favor by shifting the blame from the Nursing Home and locals officials directly to FEMA. That is why I thought this story smelled from day one it was just too good to be true which now we know it wasn’t true.
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/9368952