Levees? What levees?

At the Washington Post's website, you can watch the newly attained video of a pre-Katrina emergency staff meeting between the White House and FEMA officials.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content//video/2006/03/01/VI2006030101864.html

Then, just a few days after New Orleans flooded, Bush had the audacity to go on the air and say, "I don't think anyone anticipated the breach of the levees." He'd been told in that meeting, which is proved by the video, that the levees might fail.

Burn, baby, burn.

The same story is also on CNN:

http://www.cnn.com/2006/POLITICS/03/02/fema.tapes/index.html

and the LA Times:

http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-na-katrina2mar02,0,5568671.story?coll=la-home-headlines

But for some reason, the New York Times failed to pick this one up. Instead, they ran a story about how "hours after Hurricane Katrina made landfall, federal and state officials did not know that the levees in New Orleans were failing and were cautiously congratulating one another on the government response," not about Bush lying through his teeth to a pissed-off country. A little behind the times, are we, gentlemen?

Not only this, but on September 2, only a few days after Katrina, the Times re-printed and did not even try to criticize Bush's original claim that nobody could have predicted the failure of the levees, when in fact "dozens of news organizations had reported on the possibility of a breach well in advance of the hurricane, and even the Times' lead editorial in the same day's newspaper flatly stated that '[d]isaster planners were well aware that New Orleans could be flooded by the combined effects of a hurricane and broken levees.'"

Check it out:

http://mediamatters.org/items/200509030001

Good job, guys. Seriously, top-notch work.

To the Times editorial staff: you're just embarassing yourselves, guys. Try some humble pie, eh? And get with the program.