Did President Bush and the members of his Cabinet stop by your house today?
No?
How about the National Guard?
Did one of their guys in olive drab rap their knuckles on your front door?
No??
Well…they didn’t stop by my home either.
Darn it…
I had trash that needed taking out and both of our vehicles could use an oil change, but the president’s staff must have forgotten about it.
Oh, that’s right—the President has spent the last few days over in India and Pakistan kissing swarthy babies, shaking hands with dignitaries, and rubbing turbin enshrouded heads for good luck.
It seems to me that based on the press coverage the trip has been a success so far.
At least VP Cheney hasn’t shot anyone this week in the President’s absence.
That said, I’ll point out that, according to that same media coverage, if I were Al Sharpton (or almost any other “Race Baiting Warlord” like Lewis Farrakhan); the entire reporting staff of the ASSociated Press; or possibly a Democrat like John Kerry, Nancy Pelosi, New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagan or Louisiana Governor Kathleen Babineaux Blanco…
I should still be sitting around again this morning waiting for my trash cans to be emptied and for my free oil change.
That’s how the government is supposed to work, isn’t it?
The president isn’t just the CEO of the country, he’s an all knowing clairvoyant—a seer of all needs and wants, an omnipotent knower of all that needs knowing, and an inept doer of all things needing doing.
“Hey Pres Bush, did you change that empty TP roll in my bathroom and fill up my ice trays in the fridge last night?”
What about the cat’s litter box?
OK folks…enough silly BS humor…here is what has my boxers all bunched up this morning.
The ASSociated Press.
Specifically, the ASSociated Press’s coverage of the the “leaking” of videotapes of the president’s briefing shortly before Hurricane Katrina struck near New Orleans.
Here are the core paragraphs in the initial reporting they put out on March 1st and that was echoed in an e-mail sent out by the Democratic Party Website and retold on basically every TV station and in every newspaper in the world:
The National Hurricane Center's Mayfield told the final briefing before Katrina struck that storm models predicted minimal flooding inside New Orleans during the hurricane but he expressed concerns that counterclockwise winds and storm surges afterward could cause the levees at Lake Pontchartrain to be overrun [emphasis mine--VRR ]
"I don't think any model can tell you with any confidence right now whether the levees will be topped or not but that is obviously a very, very grave concern," Mayfield told the briefing.
Other officials expressed concerns about the large number of New Orleans residents who had not evacuated.
"They're not taking patients out of hospitals, taking prisoners out of prisons and they're leaving hotels open in downtown New Orleans. So I'm very concerned about that," Brown said.
Just in case you don't understand the point here, let me direct your attention to the fact that there is a HUGE difference between “overrunning” (or “topping”) a levee and “breeching” a levee.
Overrunning and topping involves the winds blowing the water and waves over the height of the levee, thereby causing flooding and potential further failure of the levee structure.
Remember that the New Orleans levees failed due to water saturating the base foundation of the structures, causing them to saturate and collapse from below, not above?
The assumption by the government officials and the engineers was that the levees were STRONG ENOUGH to hold themselves up if the water didn't come over their tops.
The concern was that if a Category 5 storm hit, would these same levees actually be TALL ENOUGH to hold back the waves and storm surge.
Yes we’re talking technical details here, but as the old saying goes—“The Devil’s in the Details…”
Also notice
But I thought that Brown and FEMA were supposed to be asleep at the helm while Bush was drinking Bloody Marys on vacation in Texas?
Right?
I've seen the video's personally, and the concepts in the briefing should be perfectly clear to anyone except the group of highly educated partisan MORONS like those evidently employed by the AP.
Once again this total non-story proves that the ranks of the ASSociated Press are filled with idiots or partisan hacks, or possibly a little of both.
The good news is that enough noise was made by various knowledgeable sources since the story's publication last Wednesday that the ASSociated Press elected Friday Evening to publish a great big old “OOPS” in the form of a "sorta-kinda" correction.
Almost a genuine retraction of the story, but not quite.
Of course they didn’t admit their error very loudly and of course many of the other publications and broadcast outlets that echoed their first story won’t bother to follow up with the correction:
Clarification: Katrina-Video story
ASSOCIATED PRESS
WASHINGTON (AP) _ In a March 1 story, The Associated Press reported that federal disaster officials warned President Bush and his homeland security chief before Hurricane Katrina struck that the storm could breach levees in New Orleans, citing confidential video footage of an Aug. 28 briefing among U.S. officials.
The Army Corps of Engineers considers a breach a hole developing in a levee rather than an overrun. The story should have made clear that Bush was warned about floodwaters overrunning the levees, rather than the levees breaking.
The day before the storm hit, Bush was told there were grave concerns that the levees could be overrun. It wasn't until the next morning, as the storm was hitting, that Michael Brown, then head of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, said Bush had inquired about reports of breaches. Bush did not participate in that briefing.
Yea...I know, I know, I know...some of you get tired of me whining all of the time about the media, but I also know that some of you agree with my disgust.
How the hell can these people continue to get things so wrong--time after time after time--unless they are doing it intentionally and hoping that they won't get caught?
I've said it before and I'll say it again to all of the members of the
The bloggers are everywhere, and we're watching you. We're not going away, and some of us are on a mission--a mission to end media bias and editorializing being disguised as news coverage.
As for me, personally, I remind the members of the exempt media of the words uttered by my movie Idol Clint Eastwood in the film Dirty Harry...
"Go ahead punk(s)...make my day"
1 comment:
I've always thought that the media did an acceptable job of reporting actual news stories, but their analysis is almost always faulty. Now that they've taken to "manufacturing" news instead of simply reporting it, there's no longer much practical use for them.
The problem is that the media is populated by Goddamned political science majors who believe that they can change the world just by wishing hard enough. I call these types of people "dreamers".
Those of us of a practical engineering bent know different.
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