Cheap Media Bias

Repeat a Big Lie over and over again and hope people will believe it, seems to be the theory the AP is operating on.

In a piece purportedly discussing Bush's nomination of Roberts as Chief Justice, it finds a way to assert the following (false) opinion as established fact:

Bush Chooses Roberts, Weighs Other Vacancy

...Bush was on the defensive about the administration's sluggish response to Hurricane Katrina...

Sluggish?

Define sluggish.

Prove it was sluggish.

What, exactly, was sluggish about the Federal response?

They have no answers to those questions.

Here is a detailed timeline of the unfolding disaster.

Note these excerpts of the status of federal response prior to and within 24 hours after landfall:

Friday, August 26
The Mississippi Valley Division of the Army Corps of Engineers activates teams along the Mississippi and Louisiana Gulf Coasts to prepare for a potential response to Hurricane Katrina.

Saturday, August 27
President Bush ordered a state of emergency for Louisiana, authorizing federal emergency management officials to release federal aid and coordinate disaster relief efforts.

Sunday, August 28
Gov. Kathleen Blanco, standing beside the mayor at a news conference, said President Bush called and personally appealed for a mandatory evacuation for the low-lying city, which is prone to flooding.

The Coast Guard Auxillary was preparing to deploy. “William Crouch, Vice Commodore of the Auxiliary Eighth District Central Region stated this afternoon that “units from outlying areas are preparing to depart for the disaster area as soon as the situation becomes clear.”

The Coast Guard closes the ports and waterways into New Orleans. “The Guard also moved 40 aircraft and 30 boats and cutters in positions surrounding the expected strike zone, such as Houston and Jacksonville, readying to conduct search and rescue and humantarian missions, the Guard release said. ”

Monday, August 29
As the Category 4 surged ashore just east of New Orleans on Monday, FEMA had medical teams, rescue squads and groups prepared to supply food and water poised in a semicircle around the city, said agency Director Michael Brown.

President Bush declares the states of Louisiana and Mississippi “Major Disaster Areas.”

Tuesday, August 30
The Time-Picayune reports that within 24 hours of landfall, the federal response had been:
FEMA deployed 23 Disaster Medical Assistance Teams from all across the U.S. to staging areas in Alabama, Tennessee, Texas, and Louisiana and is now moving them into impacted areas.

Seven Urban Search and Rescue task forces and two Incident Support Teams have been deployed and propositioned in Shreveport, La., and Jackson, Miss., including teams from Florida, Indiana, Ohio, Maryland, Missouri, Tennessee, Texas, and Virginia. Three more Urban Search and Rescue teams are in the process of deployment.

FEMA is moving supplies and equipment into the hardest hit areas as quickly as possible, especially water, ice, meals, medical supplies, generators, tents, and tarps.

The U.S. Department of Transportation (DOT) dispatched more than 390 trucks that are beginning to deliver millions of meals ready to eat, millions of liters of water, tarps, millions of pounds of ice, mobile homes, generators, containers of disaster supplies, and forklifts to flood damaged areas. DOT has helicopters and a plane assisting delivery of essential supplies.

The National Guard of the four most heavily impacted states are providing support to civil authorities as well as generator, medical and shelter with approximately 7,500 troops on State Active Duty. The National Guard is augmenting civilian law enforcement capacity; not acting in lieu of it.

Is it Bush's fault that State authorities did not turn over command authority of local resources to the feds in a timely manner? Are we to just abolish State and local government?

Buried in another story, we find:

Louisiana Gov. Kathleen Blanco has refused to sign over National Guard control to the federal government and has turned to a Clinton administration official, former Federal Emergency Management Agency chief James Lee Witt, to help run relief efforts.

And listen to this whining:

Four hundred to 500 officers on New Orleans' 1600-member force were unaccounted for. Some lost their homes. Some were looking for families. "Some simply left because they said they could not deal with the catastrophe," Riley said. Officers were being cycled off duty and given five-day vacations in Las Vegas and Atlanta, where they would also receive counseling. [Some also joined the looters in a free-for-all of stealing non-food items... -- ed.]

At a news conference in Baton Rouge, police Superintendent Eddie Compass denied officers deserted in droves, acknowledging some officers abandoned their jobs but saying he didn't know how many.

Two police officers killed themselves. Another was shot in the head. Compass said 150 had to be rescued from eight feet of water and others had gotten infections from walking through the murky soup of chemicals and pollutants in flooded areas.

"No police department in the history of the world was asked to do what we were asked," Compass said with a mix of anger and pride.

Oh, please! You had to walk around in dirty water.

That you had days to plan for!

God forbid the NOPD would have to change places with the FDNY on 9/11...

The local response was disgraceful. The federal response may have been imperfect, but sluggish?

I suppose that's the dream of leftists everywhere, to make everything subservient to to the utopia-driving dictator at the top, who micro-manages every little detail of their lives.

Listen, for example, to Adolf Hugo Chavez, Venezuelan utopian dictator, telling the joyful crowds exactly how to live...or else:

Chavez says capitalism created Venezuela's poverty, and a "new socialism of the 21st century" can end it.

"It's the search for social justice, for equality," Chavez said recently. "The capitalist model is perverse. It favors a minority and expropriates from the majority."

It remains unclear what sort of socialism Chavez may achieve, but his latest moves provide hints — raising taxes on foreign companies pumping oil, setting up stores to sell cheap food to the needy, subsidizing farming and industrial cooperatives, and handing over some wealthy ranchers' lands to poor farmers.

In other words, stealing. That worked really well in Zimbabwe, where the breadbasket of Africa is now starving.

"Every day it looks more like the communism of Fidel Castro," says Jesus Garrido Perez, an opposition congressman. "The economic disaster has begun."

Not so, replies Chavez. "We aren't going to copy the Cuban model, or the Chinese model, or any model," he has said. "We're building our own model."

The ideology of that model is still being shaped.

So their making it up as they go along?

In a packed auditorium, high-ranking diplomat William Izarra led a recent seminar on Chavez's "Bolivarian Revolution," named after Latin American independence hero Simon Bolivar.

"What do we mean by a new social order?" Izarra asked the crowd. "A new political system, a new way of guiding the society, a new way of thinking and interpreting reality."

His slide presentation featured one slide representing the emerging ideology, combining images of Bolivar, the yellow-blue-and-red Venezuelan flag, Che Guevara, Jesus Christ — and 51-year-old Chavez wearing the presidential sash.

Moving toward Chavez's vision of socialism will require great changes in the way most Venezuelans think, said Luis Damiani, a sociology professor who sympathizes with Chavez's goals.

"It's a problem of values," Damiani said. "The entire society is immersed in the values of consumerism."

Some opponents accuse Chavez, a former army officer elected in 1998, of planning an assault on private property, pointing to his land reform program as a starter. But Chavez has insisted private property will be respected and business encouraged.

So far, his sharpest attacks on the wealthy have been verbal.

So far. And later?

"It's bad to be rich," Chavez said in one speech. "Those who have a lot of money should donate it."

Or else!

Chavez makes clear in his marathon speeches that Venezuela needs radical change. He says universities must stop being so elitist, businesses should serve social needs, and Venezuelans should stop worrying about the clothes they wear or the cars they drive.

Because when commerce grinds to a halt, the clothes and cars are going to go downhill fast.

Chavez has clashed with the Roman Catholic leadership, though he insists his revolution has God on its side and says "we're walking on the path of Christ."

"You have to strip yourself of individualism," he urged listeners in one televised address. "You have to strip yourself of the yearnings for personal wealth. You have to strip yourself of egotism. You need to be, simply, useful."

Or you will be liquidated, for the Good of the Whole.