On Tuesday, JABBS was surprised and modestly pleased that President Bush took on
responsibility for the ineffective federal response to Hurricane Katrina. The president offered similar words in his nationally televised speech last night.
Yes, the line may have scripted by Karl Rove, who it was
learned yesterday is "in charge of the reconstruction effort." But it was an improvement over the spin-and-deny style of the Bush Administration.
Still, the press conference on Tuesday wasn't a "no-spin zone."
President Bush, like Homeland Security Secretary
Michael Chertoff before him, tried to spin the odd reaction he gave to ABC's Diane Sawyer on Sept. 1, when he
said: "I don't think anybody anticipated the breach of the levees."
Chertoff told Tim Russert he "opened newspapers (Aug. 30) and saw headlines that said 'New Orleans Dodged The Bullet.'"
The statement was ridiculous -- we'd have to assume Chertoff woke up to the morning papers on Tuesday not realizing a two-block breach had occurred the night before, and had been reported as of 1:30 a.m. Aug. 30.
And the statement was almost certainly a lie:
Newseum has 477 archived front pages from Aug. 30 -- and none of them have anything close to "New Orleans Dodged The Bullet." The best JABBS could
find were three on-line headlines, two from Aug. 29 (before the levee broke) and a factually inaccurate headline from 11:37 a.m. Central time Aug. 30.
But that didn't stop others in the administration, including Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, from
repeating the lie.And now comes President Bush, with a variation of the story on Tuesday.
Q Did
misinform you when you said no one anticipated the breach of the levees?
BUSH: No. What I was referring to is this: When that storm came by, a lot of people said we dodged a bullet. When that storm came through at first, people said, "Whew." There was a sense of relaxation. And that's what I was referring to.
And I myself thought we had dodged a bullet. You know why? Because I was listening to people probably over the airwaves say, "The bullet has been dodged." And that was what I was referring to.
***
Now, as The Daily Howler points out, "That answer is weak — but it isn’t as factually bogus as some have suggested. On the day Katrina hit, some people did say, 'over the airwaves,' that New Orleans had just dodged a bullet."
The Daily Howler then cites comments from Brian Williams of NBC's Today Show, Aaron Brown of CNN, an MSNBC meterologist, and National Public Radio.
But are we to believe that President Bush was glued to his television in Crawford, Texas, at just the right moments to view these comments? Remember, this is a man who has said he doesn't read newspapers -- instead relying on the infamous presidential daily briefings -- and who had to be provided with a DVD of newscasts so he could understand the initial critical reaction to the federal Katrina response. The image of the Bush inner circle gathered around a television or radio for primary information on Katrina doesn't ring true -- just like it didn't ring true that Chertoff relied on newspaper headlines as his source of information.
Isn't it more likely that in the 12 days that followed -- 12 days that included widespread criticism of Chertoff's ridiculous comments -- that some White House staffer did a Lexis/Nexis search to find examples of anything including the concept "New Orleans Dodged a Bullet," found a handful of television and radio comments, allowing Bush to offer a defendable excuse for his weak statement to Saywer? Certainly, the White House should have known the question would come up.
The Daily Howler had to do a Lexis/Nexis search to find the examples. Odds are, so did someone prepping the President for Tuesday's press conference.
***
This article first appeared at Journalists Against Bush's B.S.
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