So after running this bogus Katrina story for a week the AP decides to retract it on Friday night?
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.
Notice how they are still playing word games? Overrun is not the same as overtop, as a reader of Ed Morrissey’s points out:
They are replacing the verb “breach” with the verb “overrun” which means: 1 a (1) : to defeat utterly and occupy the positions of : OVERWHELM, OVERPOWER, CRUSH (2) : to invade and occupy or ravage b obsolete : to run over destructively or harmfully : run down c : to spread or swarm over The word used in all of the briefings was “overtop” or “top” as a diminutive form thereof. Overtop means. 1 : to rise above the top of : exceed in height : tower aboveDefinitions are Merriam Webster Unabridged. They are still using misleading language and really should be renamed, Agitprop Pravda.
Either way you look at this thing any half competent editor would have realized after watching the tape that this story was a hit piece. But they still decided to run with it. I sure don’t smell coincidence here anymore, this was obviously done at the behest of the Democratic party. How could the AP have gone so far into the depths of depravity that they are now a shill for the left?
Mark Noonan at Blogs For Bush brings up the same point:
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.
You think Keith Olbermann will issue a retraction?
On the Wednesday March 1 Countdown, Olbermann teased the show: “Video of the government-wide Katrina briefing, the one from August 28th, the day before the hurricane hit New Orleans and the Gulf Coast, the one in which the President is warned that the levees could be breached four days before he told the American public no one could have anticipated that the levees could be breached.”
Olbermann opened the show trumpeting the fresh evidence the Countdown host believed contradicted Bush’s public statements: “Good evening. Six months to the day after Hurricane Katrina roared ashore, half a year in which the White House has claimed repeatedly that no one could have anticipated how bad it would be, a wealth of evidence, much of it caught on tape, now revealing that President Bush was indeed fully briefed about the storm’s potential and all of the damage it might do.”
After hearkening back to the “Nixon tapes,” dubbing these the “Bush tapes,” Olbermann continued: “The tapes revealing that Mr. Bush and his Homeland Security secretary were warned in no uncertain terms before Katrina hit shore that the storm could breach levees, could risk lives in the New Orleans Superdome, could overwhelm rescuers.”
Olbermann then brought aboard Richard Wolffe of Newsweek to further discuss the tapes. The Countdown host couldn’t resist another Nixon reference as he concluded the interview wondering if Bush’s dishonesty was as bad as the “actual malfeasance or misfeasance”: “And again, as we said, as Richard Nixon always said, you can be excused for almost any crime, if you will, or failure or error of omission or commission, but if there is tape of you not doing the job and then afterwards boasting that you have done everything that you could do, that’s almost as bad as the actual malfeasance or misfeasance, is it not?”
First there was Rathergate by 60 Minutes II, now there is Katrinagate by a producer of 60 Minutes II.
Other’s Blogging:
Either way you look at this thing any half competent editor would have realized after watching the tape that this story was a hit piece. But they still decided to run with it. I sure don’t smell coincidence here anymore, this was obviously done at the behest of the Democratic party. How could the AP have gone so far into the depths of depravity that they are now a shill for the left?
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They know that the average person doesn’t pay that much attention to details in the news. They read the byline while in the 7-11 or may even buy a paper and skim over it. They watch the first 5 minutes of the news and then switch over to a sitcom. So the first break of news is all that matters.
And people buy it.