Oops, Bush Didn’t Lie; Sorry About That

Today’s Herald-Tribune, southwest Florida’s leading newspaper, published a letter to the editor demanding the impeachment of President Bush “because he lied about knowing the levies would be breached”. Perhaps this is a rant of another leftist kook who has given up on ‘Bush lied’ about WMD, but more likely it was the direct result of the lie that the Associated Press told earlier this week that, in fact, the President was told that the levies would be breached.

It is little consolation that, under fire from hundreds of bloggers, AP has issued a retraction of its original story. Newspapers like the Herald-Tribune, which gets most of its news stories from the New York Times and the AP, and the three major TV networks and also CNN are watching their readers and viewers plummet as they continue to lie and twist the reporting of events to put the Republican administration and President Bush always in the worst light possible. The decline of the major media is probably more closely tied to the rise of talk radio, the growth of the internet and the success of Fox News than to the intentional misreporting and outright bias that has turned the mainstream media into an arm of the Democratic Party. The thing is, however, I might never have turned to Rush Limbaugh, the internet and Fox News if I had not become sickened by the propaganda I was being fed by the MSM.

Here is the AP’s first report on March 1, - "federal disaster officials warned President Bush and his homeland security chief before Hurricane Katrina struck that the storm could breach levees..."

This statement by the AP is completely false, and on March 3 the AP issued a clarification that Bush was actually told that there was some chance of the levees being “topped” by Katrina.

Anyone who has dealt with the federal government knows what to expect - delays, bureaucracy, red tape and incredible inefficiency and ineptness. This is a fact of life with big government, no matter who is running things, and in an emergency like Katrina was, the local and state governments have the prime responsibility to confront the threat. Anyone who watched what happened there can never forget the incredible bungling of Mayor Nagin or the incompetence of deer-in-the-headlights, Governor Blanco, the delay in the evacuation order and those hundreds of school buses just sitting there in the flood waters.

There is no question that the federal government, largely FEMA, did not react as quickly or as well as it should have in confronting this huge, natural disaster, but as ‘Popular Mechanics’ pointed out, “In fact, the response to Hurricane Katrina was by far the largest--and fastest-rescue effort in U.S. history, with nearly 100,000 emergency personnel arriving on the scene within three days of the storm's landfall.
Dozens of National Guard and Coast Guard helicopters flew rescue operations that first day--some just 2 hours after Katrina hit the coast. Hoistless Army helicopters improvised rescues, carefully hovering on rooftops to pick up survivors. On the ground, "guardsmen had to chop their way through, moving trees and recreating roadways," says Jack Harrison of the National Guard. By the end of the week, 50,000 National Guard troops in the Gulf Coast region had saved 17,000 people; 4000 Coast Guard personnel saved more than 33,000.”

I think that a couple of quotes from two of the bloggers who exposed AP’s lie of the week say it all:

From PowerLine.com – “I think it's reasonable to assume that the AP's "clarification" is the result of our dissection of their incredibly lame story. I think this highlights, though, how hard it is for truth to catch up to error. Hundreds of newspapers printed the AP's misinformation, and it was the basis for television news on all of the broadcast networks. The correction (or "clarification") will never catch up to most of the tens of millions of people who heard the original story. The news business is all about impressions, and corrections, days after the fact, never take away the impression that the original story falsely created.”


And from BlogsForBush.com:
“What we have here is a very strange confluence of events: this story started just as Mardis Gras brought New Orleans back into the public eye. Normally, the story would be about how New Orleans is recovering - but the story instead was a bogus re-write of videos that the Administration had long ago provided to the MSM. I smell a rat here - a DemocRAT, if you ask me. This is simply too beneficial for the Democrats for it to be coincidence - there could very well be collusion, and that would make what the AP did a de-facto campaign contribution to the Democratic Party. I believe that such a donation - which would have to be figured as a value of tens of millions of dollars - would be illegal under our campaign finance laws.

We should have a full hearing in Congress, with the AP and the DNC forced to turn over all documents which may in any way be related to Katrina from the day it went ashore to the day this AP story ran last week. We need to get to the bottom of this, lest the MSM - by getting away with this - merely become an adjunct of the DNC dressed up as an independent media.”

Dan Rathergate, wherein CBS used obviously forged documents and showcased the half-deranged ravings of a long-time Bush-hater to try to influence the outcome of the last election, showed the world just how rotten this bias has become on the part of the main stream media. Open minded people need to withhold their judgment on issues until they have evaluated the information they get from several sources.