Did We Say “Breach”? What we Meants to Say Was…

If it weren’t for that Webster and his meddling dictionary, they would have gotten away with it, too!

WASHINGTON (AP) _ In a March 1 story, The Associated Press reported that federal disaster officials warned President George W. Bush and his homeland security chief before Hurricane Katrina
struck that the storm could breach levees in New Orleans, citing confidential video footage of an Aug. 28 briefing among U.S. officials.

The Army Corps of Engineers considers a breach a hole developing in a levee rather than an overrun. The story should have made clear that Bush was warned about floodwaters overrunning the levees, rather than the levees breaking.

I do love the qualifier “The Army Corps of Engineers considers…”, as if the AP was merely the victim of some obscure jargon. They might just have easily had said “Yep. We were wrong, but it wasn’t our fault. See, the Army Corps of Engineers went and used some obscure nerd word that none of us have ever heard before!”

Yeah, except that just about everyone knows what you mean when you say “breach”. The AP blew it and now they look either negligent to the point of stupidity or like garden-variety Bush-bashers who aren’t beyond a little journalistic fiction to make him look bad. It’s pretty much 50-50 on which.

Here’s the punchline. Now that the AP has made this correction, there’s literally no story. So the President was concerned about overtopping; who wouldn’t have been? Like I pointed out earlier in the week, any dunderhead would have seen a satellite photo bearing down on the Gulf Coast and thought, “That’s going to bring some pain. I hope the water doesn’t get up over those levees”. Very, very, very few people thought, “Do you think those levees are going to collapse like Jimmy Carter’s last Presidential campaign?”. After all, those levees were built to government spec and the money and contracts were handled by an honest and concerned New Orleans city govern…

….okay. Well maybe it wasn’t such a great idea to expect that everyone involved with the levees over the past 40 years did their jobs to a minimum level of competence and with the safety of the city in mind. But there’s no fault in having that expectation. That’s pretty much what you have to assume to be a functioning and social human being.

I’m sure that’s what the President believed, too, which makes him neither negligent nor criminal. It makes him a reasonable human being, just like the rest of us.

That, of course, confounds the MSM narrative which places Bush outside the realm of normal humanity and somewhere among either the great monsters of history or the hapless bumblers. I imagine that future generations, if they rely only on MSM reports and posts from the lefty blogosphere, will imagine George Bush as some bizarre combination of Cruella DeVille, Hannibal Lechter, and Dr. Evil.

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Category: Oh, THAT liberal media., President George Bush