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Dan Rather was on ''Larry King Live'' the other night and was asked about the Katrina coverage. Now, say what you like about Dan, but he knows his meteorological phenomena. I've always thought there was something quintessentially American about Dan's hurricane editions of the CBS news -- not the part of the show where he's reporting on the actual hurricane, but the bit where he says "And today's other headlines,'' as if it's the most normal thing in the world to be reading "The Dow closed 19 points down today" while wrapped around a lamppost in your sou'wester with a...

Most of the media blames President Bush and Michael Brown for the delay in getting the necessary food and water supplies to the victims of the Katrina Hurricane disaster. But before we pass judgment on anyone (the President, the Mayor or the Governor), we must be reminded that the job of the media is not just to inform the public, but to make their news presentations so exciting and so entertaining that advertisers will stand in line to advertise, which means substantial profits for their news organizations. News is a profit making business. Over the years, the media has not...

...Take the Brown bearbaiting this week. The public humiliation of bureaucrats is a Washington ritual. Rep. John Dingell turned it into a public spectacle. The Brown hearing elicited little helpful information, and the next day Gov. Kathleen Blanco, astonishingly, was not asked to reply to Mr. Brown's accusation that her administration was "dysfunctional." They let her off the hook because like them, she's a member of the elected aristocracy. Every senior manager in the federal bureaucracy followed that Brown bonfire, and they don't want to go there. For them the message is: Be careful, not decisive. FEMA won't get better;...

My friend Ralph Peters told me his sources in the Pentagon told him lawyers for FEMA and the Department of Homeland Security spent the weekend before Katrina struck arguing about what they could or couldn't do -- the emphasis was on couldn't -- absent certain permissions from Blanco. Former members of Able Danger, a military intelligence unit, have claimed they had identified hijack leader Mohamed Atta and the members of his cell more than a year before 9/11, and had tried to pass this information on to the FBI, but were forbidden to do so on the advice of Pentagon...

I'll make a deal. If politicians will follow two simple rules, I'll put the blame game under a two-week moratorium. • Rule #1: If you're not one of the elected officials who has operational responsibilities, do NOT elbow your way into a news conference simply for the pleasure of getting face time with a television camera. We need to hear details from the governor, the county judges, the mayors. We don't need to hear every member of Congress or City Council congratulate each other for the wonderful work they're doing. We don't even need to hear from the majority leader,...

An unbalanced world is getting caught up in the blame game.  As the IMF and World Bank gather in Washington this weekend for their annual meeting, the risk of finger pointing is high.  There are two sides to this increasingly contentious dispute: The United States is pinning the blame for its massive trade and current account deficits on the rest of the world -- bemoaning sluggish growth in Europe and Japan, along with unfair trading practices in China. The rest of the world holds the saving-short US accountable for a disproportionate share of the global economy’s unprecedented imbalances.  Where should the...

NEW ORLEANS, Louisiana --- The initial claims by New Orleans and Louisiana officials that tens of thousands of people were killed by Hurricane Katrina are apparently off by tens of thousands. When asked to explain such a huge discrepancy, Mayor Nagin of New Orleans blamed the failed school system that was destroyed by the Bush Administration. "If the school system here wasn't such a failure, then maybe our officials could count better," said Nagin. "Bush and his Administration destroyed our public school system by lowering taxes and passing No Child Left Behind. I even had trouble counting the number of...

You cannot predict the wind. You cannot predict the precise place a hurricane will hit. But you can predict the duties that come after. You can predict the work that must be done.

Friday, September 23, 2005 Blame Bush, part 2Posted: September 23, 20051:00 a.m. Eastern By Kevin McCullough © 2005 WorldNetDaily.com For anyone who had any questions on the matter, the entire pathetic response to the suffering people of Hurricane Katrina was entirely President Bush's fault. Or so the race baiters like Jesse Jackson, Al Sharpton and now Harry Reid would have us continue to believe. Two days before Hurricane Rita was to make landfall somewhere west of New Orleans, Minority Leader Reid picked up where the other babble-brains left off in the post-Katrina nonsense. This time Reid was criticizing the effective response...

Running out of time Fear meets frustration as Texans attempt to flee from Rita Washington Post Posted: Sept. 22, 2005 -snip- Houston's mayor acknowledged that the pre-hurricane evacuation preparations, which some Texas officials had been boasting about earlier this week, had gone awry, in part, because too many people attempted to flee the city at once. White said he had been imploring federal and state official since early Thursday to reverse traffic flow on the inbound lanes but that it had begun to occur only by mid-afternoon. "I would say there will be some learning experiences," he said. -snip- There...

It is bad enough that the Angry Left is blaming George Bush for the devastation of Hurricane Katrina. But it is really unseemly for the Governor of Louisiana and the Mayor of New Orleans to be blaming the Federal government. After all, the state and local governments in America are supposed to have the authority and the responsibility to be the first responders to natural disasters in their jurisdictions.

CONSERVATIVE FRIENDS have been sending me long, detailed e-mails about the government's response to Hurricane Katrina. They are all designed to place the blame on New Orleans Mayor C. Ray Nagin and Louisiana Governor Kathleen Blanco, while exonerating President Bush. These electronic messages have certainly been impressive and revealed previously unknown facts. After reading them, I acknowledge the timelines of what happened, when and who knew what, and when and who signed what and when. My friends are right that state and local government were the first lines of defense -- and they failed. This represents a systemic failure of...

Tim Russert and a couple of other Sunday show hosts pretty much let the cat all the way out of the bag this morning, outlining the Liberal MSM overall strategy, and how they plan to implement it. First a timeline, to avoid confusing seperate issues: 1. Blanco and Nagin led off the Blame Bush attack, a preemptive strike to avoid responsibility for their monumental failures in safeguarding Louisiana and New Orleans before, during and after the storm. 2. The Liberal MSM picked this up and ran with it, partially to support the Dems in Louisiana, and possibly partly as the...

LATEST DEMOCRAT DISASTER STRATEGY WOULD BE A DISASTER FOR LOUISIANABy Michael J. GaynorMichNews.com Sep 18, 2005 Having tried mightily (and skillfully) to shift blame to the federal government and having secured an unprecedented  bailout commitment, Louisiana's Democrat leaders are salivating at the thought of controlling begged billions of dollars, despite their rotten record, and shrilly blowing the whistle to end partisan politics, in the hope of leaving a grievous misimpression as to responsibility (and irresponsibility) in place in the minds of millions and appearing statesmanlike instead of being exposed as the utterly irresponsible villains of the piece determined to perpetuate themselves in power. Make no mistake:...

The primary villain in the Hurricane Katrina saga, of course, was Katrina herself. Yet the aftermath of the storm seems to have unleashed a pent-up fury among paint-by-numbers Bush-haters. The entire Democratic Party and its unofficial brain trust, it seems, have gotten in on the action. House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi denounced President Bush as "oblivious" to the suffering of others. Her California Democrat colleague, Rep. Barbara Lee, was even more barbed. "If anyone ever doubted that there are two Americas," she huffed, "this disaster and our government's shameful response to it have made the division clear for all to...

Nearly three weeks after Hurricane Katrina raged ashore, Gov. Kathleen Blanco still wants one question answered. Where were the buses? Hours after the hurricane hit Aug. 29, the Federal Emergency Management Agency announced a plan to send 500 commercial buses into New Orleans to rescue thousands of people left stranded on highways, overpasses and in shelters, hospitals and homes. On the day of the storm, or perhaps the day after, FEMA turned down the state's suggestion to use school buses because they are not air conditioned, Blanco said Friday in an interview. Even after levees broke and residents were crowding...

The Hurricane Katrina fiasco has been blamed on President Bush, on poorly prepared or corrupt state and local governments, and even (by Rush Limbaugh) on a “culture of entitlement” that persuaded people they should stay in their homes and let the feds take care of them. But blaming it on environmentalists? That’s a new one. The latest wrinkle in the blame game comes in a September 8 article from a Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI) scribe that charges “environmental activist groups” (specifically American Rivers and the Sierra Club) with opposing flood protection by filing lawsuits against levee construction as an “artificial...

As usual, loyal George W. Bush bashers never let the dust settle and the truth come out before sticking a foot in their mouths. The truth is coming out, regardless of what the biased media has tried to do. The mayor never mobilized the school buses or stocked the Superdome with emergency supplies. The governor needed another 24 hours before she would allow federal officials to come in and banned the Red Cross and Salvation Army from delivering supplies immediately after the winds died down. The senator from Louisiana is complaining Mr. Bush didn't help the Army Corp of Engineers...

What media bias? This media bias … Right after President Bush’s address to the nation last night, ABC reporter Dean Reynolds went out interviewing Katrina victims. He asked Bush-bashing baiting questions, however the woman he interviewed didn’t bite on to it. Note: Around the 17 second mark you can tell Reynolds cut her off to ask her another question because he was unhappy with the result. DOWNLOAD and view video here. >>> http://thepoliticalteen.com/video/abcrey.wmv

It is a feat of linguistic magic to deflect criticism as playing the "blame game," and White House press secretary Scott McClellan is Katrina's David Copperfield. To repeated questions about the delayed federal response to Hurricane Katrina, during a recent press briefing McClellan demurred by saying he wasn't going to play the blame game.