1545 Speaking of Germany

"Josef Goebbels would have been happy with much of the mainstream media in the past few weeks since Hurricane Katrina hit the Gulf Coast. Goebbels, for those of you too young to know, was Hitler's propaganda minister. He is credited with creating the concept of The Big Lie. The idea was that if you tell a lie big enough often enough, people will believe it.

The big lie of the Hurricane Katrina story is that it reveals deep and hateful racism in America, that blacks were treated worse than other people because they were black, and that this shows the hypocrisy of this supposedly egalitarian nation."

But here's the truth. Most of the horrible things we were told by our cable news networks about murder, mayhem, looting and rape, just didn't happen. Their reports kept FEMA teams out of the area. When body recovery teams from the military entered the evacuation facilities in NOLA they expected to find many bodies based on the news coverage. They found six. Gosh, five people died in Texas from using a generator improperly during Rita! The murder rate apparently slowed during the storm's aftermath. Reporters were not inside those facilities, remember. They were outside on the freeways and had no way to check the rumors. Fox News to its credit, is now correcting that image with interviews of people who are or were on the scene. I don't think they've admitted complicity in creating an anti-America news story, however. I have no idea how CNN is handling their missteps.

In addition, according to Ben Stein in this article quoted above, the blacks were victims not of racism, but geography, a terrible storm, and mass confusion. The people who came to their aid were white churches and black churches working together. People all over the country have opened their homes and businesses to these people.

So who are these racists trying to stir up hatred among us? Well, so far, they've all been liberals and Bush-bashers. It's their plantation mentality.

More on the media's role in distorting the news about the storm

Rep. Peter King (NY) on MSNBC Chris Matthews show, Hardball, Sept. 26

PK: I'm not talking about distorting the damage [of the hurricane]. I'm talking about distorting President Bush's role. Somehow, this was almost entirely blamed on him. That was a certain impression given by the media from the very first moment, when the levees broke. And you had Andrea Mitchell on talking about how that was because President Bush didn't put enough money into the water projects in Louisiana, or the levee control projects, when it turns out that he put more money in, in his first five years, than Bill Clinton did in his last five years. And no state gets more money in the country than Louisiana does. And use that as an example, and then go right through.

There was much more focus put on what President Bush was supposedly not doing, when the fact is it was the mayor who didn't provide the trucks, the buses to evacuate the people, sent the people to the Superdome without adequate food or water. And then also, there's the governor. The governor of Louisiana, and I was down there last week, she said every report that was done before this, said that a storm of this magnitude would kill 20,000 people. The fact is, so far there's less than 800. Every death is tragic, but why isn't your story less than 4% of those who were supposed to have been killed were not killed, because of the efforts of the federal government? The Coast Guard, remember, is part of Homeland Security. They were in the very first day rescuing thousands and thousands of people. That's just an example of the distortion. It's continuing today, the way you're questioning the contracts, assuming something is wrong when the president is fully following the law."

Lots of mp.3 clips well worth listening to.

"PK: [The President] was relying on what everyone, including Page 1 of the New York Times said, which was that New Orleans had ducked the storm. It wasn't until Tuesday that we realized how bad the situation was. And by then, the president had no way of knowing that the New Orleans Police and Fire Departments were going to disappear, that the governor wasn't going to adequately use the National Guard, and that the mayor had not put sufficient water and food into the Superdome. It takes a good 36 to 48 hours to move troops, the amount that were necessary, to provide relief in the Superdome."

And here's the best part.

PK to CM: "Just because the president doesn't watch you on television, it doesn't mean he's not doing his job. You know, Franklin Roosevelt wasn't hired to listen to radio accounts of D-Day. You're hired to do the job, and the president can do his job without having to listen to Chris Matthews or Andrea Mitchell or Tim Russert, or any of the others. He is doing his job."