A feisty Spike Lee showed up Friday at the Newseum for the Washington Ideas Festival. The director, who has filmed two HBO documentaries on the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, played the blame game when asked about the bungled response to the 2005 hurricane. “That’s going to go on his tombstone, it’s not good,” Lee responded when asked about President Bush‘s performance. “People are dead now because he didn’t do his job,” he added about Homeland Security head Michael Chertoff. “All along I kind of had a feeling that Michael Brown was a scapegoat and the real villain was Chertoff.”
Lee said that class and race played a role in both the slow response to Hurricane Katrina and to the more recent Gulf oil spill. “If there’s oil in the Hamptons, Martha’s Vineyard, Cape Cod, Nantucket, there’s going to be hell to pay,” he said.
He also said he was still on Team Obama. “The president is in a rough spot right now, but I’m not deserting him, he still has my support,” said Lee. The president took first lady Michelle Obama to Lee’s movie “Do the Right Thing,” on their first date.
Lee concluded his Washington appearance with an assessment of the “tea-baggers.” “To me they’re fanatics,” the director said.
