Political, Media Liberals Are Either Lying or Ignorant
By David Thibault
CNSNews.com Editor in Chief
March 06, 2006

It's no wonder that Democratic leaders Howard Dean, Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi can't win national elections. They can't even tell the difference between the words "topped" and "breached."

Likewise, there should be no mystery as to why MSNBC talk show hosts Chris Matthews and Keith Olbermann have microscopic ratings. They can't tell the difference either.

In addition to their ignorance, these liberals once again showed their lack of due diligence last week in jumping on the Bush-bashing bandwagon.

When the Associated Press was first to report that a videotape existed of a conference call involving President Bush and emergency management officials, the A.P. not only misrepresented the contents of the tape, it unleashed another round of predictable hate-speech from the Left.

The videotape was from Aug. 28, the day before the storm hit the U.S. Gulf Coast. Despite the A.P. report insinuating that the tape showed that Bush had been warned about the failure of the New Orleans levees, a check of the tape's transcript revealed that there was never any discussion about the levees being "breached."

National Weather Service meteorologist Max Mayfield did express his "grave concern" that the levees might be "topped" by flood waters.

Note to the aforementioned individuals: breach means break or collapse. Top means spill-over.

As more tapes of the Bush administration's handling of Hurricane Katrina became public, liberals took their deceit or ignorance -- it's hard to tell with these guys -- one step further.

They combined the president's comments of Aug. 29, after the storm had struck and he was discussing the threat of the levees being breached, with Bush's remarks delivered a few days after the storm when he stated that nobody had anticipated the levees being breached.

This was the "smoking gun," the president's political and media enemies charged, showing that Bush had lied when he said nobody expected the levees to fail.

The truth, of course, is that Bush wasn't warned about the possible failure of the levees on Aug. 28, and when he did talk about the subject, the storm already had blasted New Orleans.

Were the president's enemies lying? Or were they so ignorant that they didn't know the difference?

Dean either didn't check the facts himself, couldn't get his hands on a dictionary to look up the words "topped" and "breached" or he just went along with the lie.

"The President misled the American people when he claimed that no one anticipated the failure of the levees that flooded New Orleans," Dean declared.

Reid, the Senate minority leader, may have been too lazy to read the entire transcript of Bush's conference call. And maybe he and Dean had the same liberal hack scribble down their comments.

"They have systematically misled the American people to hide the basic incompetence of the recovery and the response. And as a result of this, it's made America less safe, not more safe," Reid crowed, in a typically goofy attempt to link Hurricane Katrina to the war against terrorism.

His counterpart in the House, Nancy Pelosi, called the video of Bush's conference call "an eloquent statement" that "speaks very clearly to the fact that there was a predictable tragedy that was about to befall the people of that region, and the administration's response was inadequate."

The liberal echo reached the television studios of MSNBC, which must stand for Mindless, Sloppy Nonsense Broadcast on the Cheap.

Matthews' "Hardball" show tried to advance the false premise in quizzing fellow liberal Bob Shrum.

"This is the president. He didn't say, 'I didn't expect the, the, the lakes to be over, to run over the levees.' Here he says, 'I don't think anybody anticipated the breach of the levees.' Why a universal statement like that when it's clear he was briefed as to the prospect that it might well happen?"

Not to be outdone, Olbermann tried to connect President Bush to Richard Nixon and the Watergate scandal. "What did President Bush know of the storm and when did he know it?" Olbermann asked in yet another revision of the line made famous by Sen. Howard Baker during Watergate.

Olbermann, who always sounds like he's going through the middle of an awful divorce, closed with another comparison. He meant the comparison to include Bush.

"As Rodney Dangerfield said in that movie, you want to look thin, hang out with a bunch of fat people. If you want to look better, more competent, hang out with a bunch of people who aren't."

Late Friday (a typical move when nobody was paying attention) the A.P. "clarified" its original article. Not a retraction, which was demanded, and not a correction -- just a lousy clarification. That's like saying, "You better put some ice on that lip," following a sexual assault.

Dean, Reid, Pelosi, Matthews and Olbermann, who in unison jumped on the phony story (doesn't this remind you of Rather-gate), haven't apologized either. And I won't hold my breath.

(David Thibault is editor-in-chief of Cybercast News Service.)