Good points re: the agenda.

There are a few things I wish he would have (or been able to) push harder on. Tax cuts are always useful, but the ones he got through were OK.

I wish his early crack at immigration had been given a fair discussion rather than being attacked from all sides. This is an issue that is rapidly reaching the point where it may not be able to be ignored much longer but people want simplistic answers like close the borders and round up the immigrants for deportation. Neither is particularly workable but the roundup is especially not going to happen. The US public, xenophobic neanderthal fascist theocons though we may be, is not going to sit by and quietly watch millions of people torn out of their homes. It just isn’t going to happen.

Social security apparently can’t yet get a hearing from the American people. We still wedged with the idiocy that Granny’s benefits are going to be snatched out of her arthritic fingers. He may be able to get back to this. We’ll see.

In his defense he’s been somewhat overcome by events not of his making and, to an extent, made worse by his predecessors.

The crash of 2000 wasn’t his doing. To the small extent that such things can be laid at the feet of POTUS, Bubba bears the blame there.

A long line, beginning with Carter, could have done a lot to either have fought the GWOT or at least engaged the enemy. That one fell in his lap.

A completely corrupted UN wasn’t his doing but he’s had to fight it tooth and nail internationally. There’s another one former POTUSs could have mitigated at least a little bit. This problem for international issues has been exacerbated by a corrupt scumbag leading France, a useless cipher leading Germany, a questionable guy stuck between a rock and a hard place leading Russia, a stark-raving madman run amock in NK, and so on. A lot of international boils got deep, wide, and painful over the past 5 years. He didn’t create any of it but he’s stuck with it.

I still shudder when I think what might have been. Al Gore couldn’t deal with the stress of his own campaign without going bonkers. Kerry makes Shroeder look like a man of substance. Neither of those no-ops coulda dealt with what McChimpy Bu$hitler has had thrown at him. We’d be 5 years further down the road to Armegeddon with those idiots telling us not to worry, doing nothing but feeling Other People’s Pain.

Yes, I certainly hope – and now suspect – my skepticism was misplaced and also hope the most recent reports reflecting far fewer casualties and incidents are the more accurate accounts. I presented the Times-Picayune article only as a reminder of what was originally reported, not to accept it at face value.

The Left/Dem/MSM crowd – the Politburo/Pravda, self-anointed crowd – has its share of mendacious and even malevolent mendicants of the political order they deem to be the rightful order. If that’s an exaggeration one may be forgiven for doubting it’s much of an exaggeration at all.

1. Journalist has explosive but questionable scoop, whose authenticity he/she has not verified (nb. emphasis on has not verified, not “cannot verify”).

2. Instead of seeking to verify scoop with solid evidence, journalist seeks comment on scoop’s veracity from elected official and his aides. Official does not deny story (Bush/Rove) or confirms story (Nagin). Journalist publishes unverified (but undisputed by authorities) story.

3. Story turns out to be bogus. Journalist points finger at elected official for not disabusing journalist of bogus story prior to publication.

Am I missing something here, or is this an unbelievably sloppy and careless professional practice?

Can anyone imagine any other profession– doctors, accountants, architects– adhering to such an absurd non-standard of review and scrutiny for their preliminary work product? Imagine if surgeons justified medical errors by saying that the patient’s family did not disabuse the doctor of an incorrect diagnosis. Or if architects blamed builders for not telling them that the architects’ recommended steel lacked the necessary tensile strength to support the structure.

Journalism’s sausage factory is getting uglier and uglier. When even amateurs can spot the flaws in the process, it’s time to shut down the factory and start over.

The first hand BBC account you linked to is surely a tale of what would pass for “hell” for most anyone, especially an 18 yr. old Rugby player from the UK. But nothing Stuart Bird witnessed equates to the rape and murder stories that were originally presented. He was verbally abused by angry black people. Someone “threatened” to “take out a gun and kill all the white people”. No gun materialized and nobody killed all the white people.

He saw a woman, apparently dead, dragged out of the crowd. Recent reports, IIRC, have four people dying of “natural causes” outside the Superdome. It is entirely possible young Mr. Bird saw one of those unfortunate people being dragged away. Undignified as the treatment may have been there’s no evidence it was a murder.

As for the Times-Picayune article, this is precisely the reporting that is being called into question now. One might imagine that the T-P, or some other enterprising reporter, would track down Mikel Brooks and/or other members of the Arkansas National Guard who allegedly made these claims of seeing 30 or 40 “more” bodies stacked in the “freezer”.

Chances are very good, however, that what Brooks and others saw were one or two of the six bodies eventually recovered from the ‘Dome and they never saw any bodies stacked in a freezer but, rather, heard of them from someone who heard from someone who heard from someone…

All that said there was no good reason the ‘Dome had to be whatever level of hell it was. It could have, and should have, been secured and managed by NOLA officials.

The LA times article Thibaud linked to provides some interesting snippets.

Times-Picayune Editor Jim Amoss cited telephone breakdowns as a primary cause of reporting errors, but said the fact that most evacuees were poor African Americans also played a part.

The T-P doesn’t seem interested in trying to defend its earlier reporting.

“If the dome and Convention Center had harbored large numbers of middle class white people,” Amoss said, “it would not have been a fertile ground for this kind of rumor-mongering.”

Ummm… so was the fiasco a result of “racism”, or the result of poor, black people being prone to overwrought rumor-mongering or, is Mr. Amoss… never mind.

Some of the hesitation that journalists might have had about using the more sordid reports from the evacuation centers probably fell away when New Orleans’ top officials seemed to confirm the accounts.

Well, if the people who should have been in control and, therefore, should have had some accurate information hadn’t jumped into the rumor-mongering…

Nagin and Police Chief Eddie Compass appeared on “Oprah” a few days after trouble at the Superdome had peaked.

Compass told of “the little babies getting raped” at the Superdome. And Nagin made his claim about hooligans raping and killing.

Sigh… a little local leadership might have gone a long way.

State officials this week said their counts of the dead at the city’s two largest evacuation points fell far short of early rumors and news reports.

Where are the local officials who originally made the claims, Nagin and Compass, to either retract and “admit mistakes”, or defend their claims?

Ten bodies were recovered from the Superdome and four from the Convention Center, said Bob Johannessen, spokesman for the Louisiana Department of Health and Hospitals.

(National Guard officials put the body count at the Superdome at six, saying the other four bodies came from the area around the stadium.)

How would anyone pull off a “cover up”? Who is beaming their mind-control rays onto the NG people who went into the ‘dome? What possible motive would any of the “boots on the ground” have for joining in a coverup?

The media inaccuracies had consequences in the disaster zone.

Some of the hesitation that journalists might have had about using the more sordid reports from the evacuation centers probably fell away when New Orleans’ top officials seemed to confirm the accounts.

Nagin and Police Chief Eddie Compass appeared on “Oprah” a few days after trouble at the Superdome had peaked. Compass told of “the little babies getting raped” at the Superdome. And Nagin made his claim about hooligans raping and killing.

We need an investigation of these characters, NOW, before more damage is done and so that billions of $$$ are not sucked up by the same kleptocratic children whose lies and incompetence are the greatest cause, by far, of the loss of life that actually did occur in New Orleans.

From the LA Times, of all places, an admission that the MSM’s victory was, shall we say, short-lived: http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-na-rumors27sep27,0,5492806,full.story?coll=la-home-headlines

Katrina Takes a Toll on Truth, News Accuracy

Rumors supplanted accurate information and media magnified the problem. Rapes, violence and estimates of the dead were wrong.

….newspapers and television exaggerated criminal behavior in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, particularly at the overcrowded Superdome and Convention Center.

The New Orleans Times-Picayune on Monday described inflated body counts, unverified “rapes,” and unconfirmed sniper attacks as among examples of “scores of myths about the dome and Convention Center treated as fact by evacuees, the media and even some of New Orleans’ top officials.”

…Mayor C. Ray Nagin told a national television audience on “Oprah” three weeks ago of people “in that frickin’ Superdome for five days watching dead bodies, watching hooligans killing people, raping people.”

“I don’t think you can overstate how big of a disaster New Orleans is,” said Kelly McBride, ethics group leader at the Poynter Institute, a Florida school for professional journalists. “But you can imprecisely state the nature of the disaster.

Nope again. The MSM is not incompetent at being biased. They slant the news quite effectively. Michael Brown resigned, Bush’s poll numbers went down, even neo-cons now rail against Bush’s so-called “cronyism”, and the “Bush is a racist” lie is now out there for all time. Nobody seems to know Brown was confirmed by the Senate and had done an acceptable job for several years. Nobody thought Bush appointing men and women he already knows was a big problem before. Nobody seems to care about any of the policies Bush has instituted to help poor blacks. That, sirs, is the MSM getting the job done, not incompetence.

Negating these accounts also would seem to be too pat and too convenient a cover-up from any number of angles. FPM.com has also reported Mayor Nagin is being touted and revivified in another post-mortem, revisionist line by the NYT. Is that to be accepted uncritically as well?

Too, for a little thought experiment, imagine if Nagin had been the President and Bush the Mayor. Under that inverted scenario does anyone – anyone – seriously believe the NYT would be working to revive the Mayor’s reputation while demonizing the President’s? From Chris Matthews and Maureen Dowd to the NYT and the WaPo and other members of the Mainstream Manipulators, the demonization/apologetic polarities would generally be reversed – or minimally there would be a studied silence and avoidance in one direction while the spotlight would be focused in the other direction. And the MSM would be perpetrating it all with sophistical ease.

No certainty can be attached to that imagined scenario, but generally stated one can be excused for believing such would be the slant and focus: away from the White House and onto the local cast and crew.

h/t, Mangan’s Miscellany