chertoff adopts a familiar tactic

Today Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff argued that planners never expected "two" disasters to hit New Orleans at the same time - a major hurricane followed by major flooding. He said "That 'perfect storm' of a combination of catastrophes exceeded the foresight of the planners, and maybe anybody's foresight."

Wow. The sheer dishonesty of this -- remarkable even by Bush Administration standards -- really takes my breath away. Of COURSE people anticipated a hurricane followed by flooding. It wasn't a hurricane's winds that were expected to bring New Orleans to its knees, but the surge of waters and the breaking of levees and ensuing major flooding that everybody, and I mean everybody, feared. Check out some of my earlier posts on this, or read the CNN article linked above, for links proving that this "combination" WAS anticipated by academics, by journalists, by local governments and EVEN by the Federal government. Hell, just last year there was a major exercise in New Orleans based precisely on Chertoff's "surpries scenario" of a hurricane hitting and the levees breaking.

The familiar tactic Chertoff has adopted is what Goebbels called The Big Lie. For today's Republicans, that translates to saying something often enough and let Fox and Limbaugh and Drudge and the rest of the right-wing media machine repeat it often enough to cow the rest of the media and much of the public into more or less accepting it as truth. You know, like Bush did when he alleged Iraq had weapons of mass destruction and was involved in the attacks of September 11.

In other times and other places, government officials who lie so boldly and so baldly in the face of an utter disaster founded on disregard and sheer incompetence are fired. In the Republican America of 2005, Chertoff and FEMA Director Michael Brown instead should be thinking about what suit will go best with a Medal of Honor.