Limits to lies ... take 2

In an earlier post, I surmised that perhaps the American people simply do not care about lying anymore ... and it will be interesting to watch what happens with the President's poll numbers in response to Rita AND the revelations that just about everything we were told about Katrina was an out-n-out lie.

My conclusion will be that there will be almost no change for reasons that I stated earlier ... this has been the template that the media uses to destroy Mr. Bush. This template is to focus on completely bad stuff, or buffer any good stuff with bad news ... and if anything is misreported the corrections come in very quietly, if at all.

Katrina is a great example ... they now know that absolutely nobody died in the Superdome and Convention Centers as a result of the (widely reported) violence and chaos which erupted because of the slow Federal response ... and in fact the numbers were literally miniscule ... 6 dead at the Superdome ... 4 from "natural" causes, 1 suicide and 1 OD. In addition, the widespread murder and chaos that was happening in the city that the media wanted you to think was George Bush's fault turned out to be no more than what New Orleans would experience in any other week during the year. Granted you do not normally have running gun battles between rival gangs of looters, just that this type of violence simply replaced the normal violence that is always there ... and more importantly the numbers of "violent deaths", the ones most easily blamed on Mr. Bush, were orders of magnitude fewer than reported.

Rita will probably garner the President very little, if any, credit. The reason for this is that the federal response to hurricanes over the last few years has been exceptional, and the Rita response simply followed the pattern of the last few years (Katrina was the exception). Incidentally, the excellent response by the feds over the last few years was a result of Michael Brown's exceptional leadership, which doesn't play into the media template very well. The city and state governments of Texas followed their plans, and even though they did not come off perfectly (as is ALWAYS the case with anything of this magnitude), the contingencies were also planned out and everything worked LIKE IT WAS SUPPOSED TO!

This is important ... as it is a perfect example of how things were supposed to be. In the TX evacuation, the traffic snarled and gasoline started to run out. Texas local or state officials (I believe it was state) saw the problem, figured out a solution, and then called FEMA to provide support. FEMA took the call, engaged the appropriate resources, and got tanker trucks to the stranded motorists. Now, did the plan work perfectly? No. Did the contingency work perfectly? No (some of the motorists pulled weapons on the tanker drivers, demanding a full tank instead of the allotted 5 gals). But ultimately the job got done and they pulled off the most massive evacuation in the history of this country, perhaps the world. One more thing ... if you think that this happened in spite of Mr. Brown ... like FEMA suddenly healed all of its problems in 2 weeks ... then you need to go drink some more kool-aid. This proves that the whole system works effectively if you have competent (i.e. republican) leadership (couldn't resist! ;-).

Now, the media is in a bind because this proves that the majority of the effort is in planning and execution at the city and state levels, but if they give them too much credit than it will be hard to keep the blame on Bush for Katrina. This messes up their template, so expect Rita to go quietly into that dark night.