"Breached", not "Topped". It was fun today to see the entire media sail off like Emily Litella getting tripped up like on one of those tricky word problems on the SAT's. Today's Big Story was all about a videotape that shows, among other things, someone giving a presentation to the President prior to Katrina saying that it was possible that the levees could be "topped", meaning that some water could spill over the tops of them.
Days later, the President was quoted as saying, "I don't think anyone anticipated the levees would be breached." "Breached". Not "Topped". "Breached" is what happened, meaning that the levees actually gave way. This discrepancy did not concern the press, who universally ran with the story that the President was caught in some sort of lie.
What it really showed was that the Mainstream Media got everything, and I mean everything, wrong in New Orleans. In the early going, they vastly overstated the magnitude of the fatalities. They repeated rumors as fact, like the story that some young girl had been raped and had her throat slit at the Superdome. Never happened. They glossed over the roles of the Mayor and the Governor and laid the vastly overblown blame solely at the feet of FEMA.
Michael Brown became the designated scapegoat and the President was berated mercilessly for saying, "Brownie, you're doing a heckuva job." In the most ironic twist of all, in the tape it is Michael Brown who seems most in command of the situation. Bizarrely, today I heard a commentator accusing the President of scapegoating Brown, now that Brown can be seen as having accurately foreseen the problems.
What is truly distasteful about all this is the relentless politicization of this tragedy. Why is Bush the story? Based on this tape, it seems to me that the Administration was pretty cognizant of the problem and knew what was coming. It was, by the way, reasonable to be concerned about levee topping. It is true that nobody anticipated a breach.
I wish someone could tell me what exactly FEMA should have done that they didn't. Where is an actual analysis of what went wrong? My own feeling is that the politics are driving this story, and that Mainstream Media is all too happy to use it to damage the Administration, particularly among African-Americans. What would an in-depth analysis reveal? My guess is that we would find the lion's share of the blame would fall on the Democratic Mayor and Governor. Can't have that! And, if the Administration tries to defend itself, it is immediately cast as "shifting the blame". Can't win.
Ultimately, however, it's the American people and what's left of the Dinosaur Media that suffer. Each time the media plays the advocate, they sacrifice a little more of their credibility. I know I'm not the only one who sees through this garbage. And then I, and an Army of Davids (ht: Glenn Reynolds and Instapundit) start to chip away at the lies.
Result? The audience for the Dinosaurs gets smaller and smaller, and stupider and stupider; and the American people get less and less well informed. A successful democracy depends on a population that has accurate information upon which to base its decisions.
So that's why I sit here pecking at these keys, and posting this little item out there in the blogosphere. The truth shall set you free!
Days later, the President was quoted as saying, "I don't think anyone anticipated the levees would be breached." "Breached". Not "Topped". "Breached" is what happened, meaning that the levees actually gave way. This discrepancy did not concern the press, who universally ran with the story that the President was caught in some sort of lie.
What it really showed was that the Mainstream Media got everything, and I mean everything, wrong in New Orleans. In the early going, they vastly overstated the magnitude of the fatalities. They repeated rumors as fact, like the story that some young girl had been raped and had her throat slit at the Superdome. Never happened. They glossed over the roles of the Mayor and the Governor and laid the vastly overblown blame solely at the feet of FEMA.
Michael Brown became the designated scapegoat and the President was berated mercilessly for saying, "Brownie, you're doing a heckuva job." In the most ironic twist of all, in the tape it is Michael Brown who seems most in command of the situation. Bizarrely, today I heard a commentator accusing the President of scapegoating Brown, now that Brown can be seen as having accurately foreseen the problems.
What is truly distasteful about all this is the relentless politicization of this tragedy. Why is Bush the story? Based on this tape, it seems to me that the Administration was pretty cognizant of the problem and knew what was coming. It was, by the way, reasonable to be concerned about levee topping. It is true that nobody anticipated a breach.
I wish someone could tell me what exactly FEMA should have done that they didn't. Where is an actual analysis of what went wrong? My own feeling is that the politics are driving this story, and that Mainstream Media is all too happy to use it to damage the Administration, particularly among African-Americans. What would an in-depth analysis reveal? My guess is that we would find the lion's share of the blame would fall on the Democratic Mayor and Governor. Can't have that! And, if the Administration tries to defend itself, it is immediately cast as "shifting the blame". Can't win.
Ultimately, however, it's the American people and what's left of the Dinosaur Media that suffer. Each time the media plays the advocate, they sacrifice a little more of their credibility. I know I'm not the only one who sees through this garbage. And then I, and an Army of Davids (ht: Glenn Reynolds and Instapundit) start to chip away at the lies.
Result? The audience for the Dinosaurs gets smaller and smaller, and stupider and stupider; and the American people get less and less well informed. A successful democracy depends on a population that has accurate information upon which to base its decisions.
So that's why I sit here pecking at these keys, and posting this little item out there in the blogosphere. The truth shall set you free!
posted by alwaysright at
5:36 PM
3 Comments:
You know - we all do it. Even research points to the fact that we do it. We form an opinion on something based on our view of the world, then we pick and choose from among the facts available to us to support our point of view – even to the extent that we ignore other, just as relevant data. I chuckled about your nit-picking over the difference between levees “being breached” and levees “being topped” – as if somehow there really is a difference when the city is below sea level. If the water in Lake Pontchartrain continued to top the levee for a long enough period of time, the water on both sides of the levee would have leveled off, leaving the city under water. The fact is that in either case, the city gets flooded to some degree. So that you not lose sight of the warnings that everyone had about the possibility of a problem with New Orleans and a deadly hurricane, I point you to this article from CNN on 9/5/2005- http://www.cnn.com/2005/US/09/03/katrina.chertoff/. There are lots of other examples of pre-Katrina warnings, but I didn’t want to spend that much time researching the issue.
I also marvel at how quickly you dismiss the death, injuries and loss of property by pointing to the errors of the press (it wasn’t as bad as it was reported, was it?) without acknowledging the destruction and devastation as horrific. Or again, that you dismiss our nation’s lack of a quick response (or even an adequate delayed response) and try to distract us by pointing to some over-hyped news reports.
I think, most of all, what bothers me is the lack of leadership from the President. Even now, 2000 people are unaccounted for and huge sections of the coastline cities lie in ruins. Thousands of our fellow citizens remain displaced, virtually homeless. Some are still hungry – unable to find work or even the resources to move to areas where they might fend for themselves. Why does our President not call together all of the resources at his command – public and private – and build a plan for finding the lost (whether dead or alive), clearing the debris, determining which areas are worth rebuilding, and helping our fellow countrymen and women rebuild their lives? Christian President? I think not.
Dude,
There's a HUGE difference between breached and topped. Topped means a little water damage, breached means catastrophe. And I never said that people weren't warned. Hell, even I knew that if a hurricane ever hit New Orleans dead on they were in a world of hurt.
And thank you for making the obligatory observation that I quickly dismiss the death and destruction. I'm surprised you didn't lead with that.
My point is that this issue has been politicized in a way that will make it difficult for us to ever know what went wrong, and thereby learn from it so we, as a people, respond better.
I wish you'd stop whining about a lack of leadership from the President. Seriously, what more do you expect him to do? The Federal government has allocated billions of dollars, and all the resources it has that can be brought to bear on this situation.
Did it occur to you that this is an unprecedented disaster? Nothing of this scale has ever happened before. You've got a landmass the size of Great Britain that's been completely devastated. Christ, France had a heatwave a couple summers ago and fifteen thousand people died.
You know what I think? I think that everyone involved in this disaster was trying their best to do the right thing. I'm sure Ray Nagin, Governor Blanco, FEMA, and the administration all were doing their level best to save lives. We need an honest evaluation of what happened if we're going to do better next time!
Fix the problem, not the blame.
Fix the problem, not the blame.
And sometimes the problem is who you put in charge of things. Bush can take the blame for assigning "Brownie" as head of FEMA.
And for deliberately underfunding levee construction.
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