truth and fiction

I don't know if you saw NOW or not this week, but the episode was a deja vu doozy.

In a 2002 interview, Walter Maestri, the Emergency Manager for Jefferson Parish, one of the biggest metropolitan areas of New Orleans, told NOW what a powerful hurricane might do to New Orleans. "It's ... got a wall of water in front of it some 30, 40 feet high. As it approaches the levees that surround the city, it tops those levees.... The bowl now completely fills. And we've now got the entire community underwater ... some 20, 30 feet underwater. Everything is lost."

Apparently, both Bush and those irresponsible Marxist newswriters at the New York Times missed this episode also because they're both peddling the ridiculous and patently false line that they "don't think anyone anticipated the breach of the levees."

From a posting at Media Matters:

In fact, dozens of news organizations had reported on the possibility of a breach well in advance of the hurricane, and even the Times' lead editorial in the same day's newspaper flatly stated that "[d]isaster planners were well aware that New Orleans could be flooded by the combined effects of a hurricane and broken levees."