(By Ray D.) Here is a small but telling example of how SPIEGEL ONLINE handles news on the United States. The following is a story as featured on SPIEGEL ONLINE's homepage March 2: And here is the translation:Revealing Video: Threatening...

The news today comes as no surprise to me, but may indeed burst the bubble of many an aspiring President Bush basher. New tapes have come to light and this is indeed not good news for the left's angry rants:...

h/t Drudge AP FRIDAY NIGHT CLARIFICATION ON BUSH/KATRINA VIDEO Fri Mar 03 2006 19:48:29 ET Clarification: Katrina-Video story ASSOCIATED PRESS WASHINGTON (AP) _ In a March 1 story, The Associated Press reported that federal disaster officials warned Pr...

Note to the left: The levee of inaccurate anti-Bush Katrina coverage overtopped a long time ago. But now the levee has breached and the floodwaters are rising. Evacuate! Evacuate! The attack from the left on President Bush over Hurricane Katrina has be...

A better example of ad hominem is your bringing up the racial accusations, which have exactly _nothing_ to do with this discussion. The title of the thread is "Bush is Warned on Katrina in Video". The point is that even after being told (repeatedly, if Brownie is correct) about the potential threat to the entire Guld Coast area (not just NOLA), Bush unashamedly lied to avoid looking like an idiot in the aftermath.

Not to mention the fact that I'm _sure_ civil engineers know the difference between breach and overtop. But Bush is no civil engineer, and my point was that the defense Beverage offered up that Bush might be intimately familiar with those terms simply doesn't hold water (no pun intended).

Alright, I've decided to create a new post on this subject in an effort to be more clear and articulate. I understand that in my rush to get the original post out, I wasn't very clear on some points and......

All that video undermines the claim that the Administration didn't take the hurricane threat seriously. There's videotape from sessions over the course of six days. Sounds like they took it quite seriously....

First, Katrina dealt the Florida, Mississippi and Louisiana coasts a far more devastating blow than New Orleans. FEMA's response was generally deemed adequate in those regions. That was first, because the state and local officials there were more capable and performed better than their New Orleans counterparts, and because the density of the population was for the most part lower in those regions.

Second, the Press concentrated on New Orleans, and made it out to be a racial issue. It was not, of course, but that is one of the reasons that FEMA's performance was under a microscope and its failings exaggerated. That is not to say its failings were not significant, because they were. But in the face of the largest natural disaster in the nation's history, it would have been a miracle had significant failings not been exposed under such circumstances.

Third, the difference between what happened (breech of the levees) and what was predicted (topping of the levees) is not simply a difference in figure of speech. The risks of each of those situations are far different as any civil engineer will tell you.

Beverage and Hinderaker's comments are particularly idiotic. The idea that Geroge W. Bush, whom even his supporters admit doesn't do "words" well, was intentionally playing on the subtleties of 'breach' vs. 'overtopping' is laughable on its face. And Hinderaker tries to dodge the anticipation issue altogether by trying to draw attention to the pointless issue of when completely different quotes were reported.

I'll grant that the environment at the time was highly chaotic, but good god man! This is FEMA and DHS we're talking about here - their entire purpose is to deal with chaotic situations! To even imply that they were overwhelmed by the confusion is a de facto indictment of everyone involved for gross incompetence!

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In dramatic and sometimes agonizing terms, federal disaster officials warned President Bush and his ...

The Galvin Opinion has discovered a disturbing fact: The White House already knew hurricanes were dangerous before Katrina hit the Gulf Coast...