Go read this post on Americablog. There’s a big image on there, but give it time to download for full effect. I can’t decide if the President is lying, or if he really believes what he’s saying. I also can’t decide which would be worse.
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So far I've written 137,655 words in 992 posts. 1,035 comments have been posted, with a total of 67,940 words.
11 Comments
I suppose these guys were lying too.
NEW ORLEANS, Aug. 29 – Hurricane Katrina pounded the Gulf Coast with devastating force at daybreak on Monday, sparing New Orleans the catastrophic hit that had been feared but inundating parts of the city…
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/08/30/national/30storm.html?ex=1126843200&en=bd1f39f71a10ba03&ei=5070&hp&ex=1125460800&en=bcd2486b0d4b47a2&ei=5094&partner=homepage&oref=login
HURRICANE KATRINA: NEW ORLEANS; Escaping Feared Knockout Punch, Barely, New Orleans Is One Lucky Big Mess
http://query.nytimes.com/gst/abstract.html?res=F60F16F83D550C738FDDA10894DD404482
Woah, Marty: are you suggesting that Katrina wasn’t that bad or something? I feel like I’m talking to someone who is claiming that the Nazi holocost never happened or that evolution is a trick of the devil or something – er, ah. By the way the reason those two headlines seem to downplay the devastating effects of Katrina is because they were written BEFORE the levees broke!
More specifically, Nick, they were written before we had any ability to say if things had gone well or not. So yes, Marty, in the sense that before we had any justification for thinking anything, we thought we might have dodged a bullet. I’d tend to hold journalists and politicians to a higher standard.
On the other hand, you’re right, a couple of articles from the New York Times easily counterbalances the view of 42 other newspapers, thereby vindicating the President.
Journalism is supposed to cover events as they happened. In that case an August 29th story about N.O. “dodging a bullet” would not have been wrong, just the way that it seemed at the moment.
What is suprising remains in the original comment: the lengths people will go to mould the facts to support their ideology.
It may have ‘seemed’ that way, but only because people were speaking from incident. The National Weather Service issued a flash flood warning because of a levee breach around 45 minutes before the hurricane’s eye reached NO. There was no time at which we could feel like we’d dodged anything, unless we decided to feel what we wanted rather than, you know, find stuff out.
Source: http://www.talkingpointsmemo.com/katrina-timeline.php
No, no, no. Consider: A daily paper published on the 29th of August is largely written on the 28th, understand? I think you’re equating how easy it is to update a web page as opposed to a newspaper that is printed at 2 or 3 AM of the 28th to hit the newsstands on the 29th. Regardless of whether Talking Points memo is dead-on or not.
That doesn’t matter, Nik – the levees were broken before the storm hit (or at least at about the same time). So there was no point at which we could have thought we dodged a bullet, unless we decided to go on what we thought might happen. Again, I hope for more from journalists and politicians.
Are you reading the same history I am? Are you paying attention to the pub dates? Stay with me here: August 29th, the date of pub of that headline, was a day before the levees broke. Furthermore, a newspaper published the morning of the 29th was largely written on the 28th. Early morning of the 29th, the newspaper was printed. Now you can armchair quarterback the media all you want (and offhand I can think of way better examples than those two), but nobody can predict the future. Sure, in hindsight, it looks pretty bad. But that’s why they call it hindsight, eh? I think you’re being unfair. There are far, far better examples of a cosseted media asleep at the wheel than that.
Apparently I’m not reading the same stories as you. The ones I see are dated on the 29th, published on the 30th. But either way your point is wrong, because the levees broke about the same time as the storm hit. So. Either the stories were written the day before the levees broke, in which case they were written the day before the storm hit. If that’s the case, then what the hell business do they have making up headlines like “Hurricane Katrina Slams Into Gulf Coast; Dozens Are Dead”? That’s not enough a guess, and is grossly negligent as a public service.
Or, as seems pretty clear from the fact that they were published the day after the hurricane hit, they were speculating when they could instead have done some of that new-fangled reportering I’ve heard about.
Either way, I’m sure there are a great many examples that would put this one in the shade from a journalistic point of view. My point is that Bush said we all thought we’d dodged a bullet, when in actual fact only the people who were demonstrably incompetent or unqualified thought that. That’s fine if you’re the guy next door, but not when you’re the President or the estate that’s supposed to keep an eye on him.
(Just to help out, here’s a quote from the first story: “By JOSEPH B. TREASTER and KATE ZERNIKE
Published: August 30, 2005″)
Yeah, our timelines are not congruent. There were multiple landfalls of Katrina in the area, so saying “about the same time as the storm hit” shows that your timeline is pretty coarse. And one story was the 29th. I’m going by this timeline: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_Hurricane_Katrina#Monday.2C_August_29
Well the two stories I see are both from the 30th (i.e. presumably written on the 29th) – the one I quoted above, and the other is “NATIONAL DESK | August 30, 2005, Tuesday” But maybe you’re looking at some other story.
I was taking the first landfall (which is actually a second landfall in this case) at 6:10. Obviously if we want to count it later, then the gap between landfall and levee breach is even smaller, making it even worse that they claimed things were OK.
But again, this is really about the President rather than the papers. I think the point still stands; you could only think we dodged a bullet if you weren’t bothering to find out.