Thursday, March 02, 2006
Partial and Whole Wingnuts
Yesterday, Powerline assumed the position of Bush apologist and MSM Rollbacker in defending against the Associated Press report that Bush was informed of the breaching of the levees in New Orleans before Hurricane Katrina hit:
The AP article is fatally compromised by its factual errors, and adds nothing to our understanding of the issues surrounding Hurricane Katrina. It also raises an important point about the leaks that form the basis for many news stories these days. The AP took what appears to have been a substantial quantity of leaked material, and turned it into a brief against the Bush administration. Whether the documents themselves contain anything noteworthy, and whether, on balance, they support the AP's tendentious interpretation, is impossible to tell. In view of the fact that no one trusts the AP, the New York Times and other news outlets who make use of leaked documents and other materials to report on them objectively, here is a modest proposal: let us see them. If the AP will release the leaked materials, the rest of us will quickly figure out what significance, if any, they have.
Fair enough.
We have a blogosphere full of lefties that believe the media is lying when they report about Democrats being linked to the Abramoff lobbying scandal. So it's not a shock to see the same kind of incredulity on the right.
But there's a certain right wing Captain and crew who are either completely retarded or just like to lie.
Excerpts from today's Captain Quarters:
For those who want to see the transcripts themselves of the video conferences, the New York Times has them for the August 28th and August 29th briefings. The transcript for the 29th makes one garbled mention of the levees around New Orleans (page 6).
....The transcript from the August 28th meeting talked more about levees, but in the same vein, and this time no one mentions the word "breach".
....Again, the entire briefing that related to levees only focused on the effects of the wind on Lake Pontchartrain and its effect in pushing water over the top of the levees. Mayfield never even addressed the possibility of breaches in the levee walls. And in fact, the storm track shifted eastward in the final hours before Katrina hit, which eliminated much of the predicate for even the worries Mayfield expresses in this transcript.
The media got it wrong yet again on Katrina. The notion that the experts warned of levee breaches is nothing more than a hack job initiated by the AP and continued by the rest of the Exempt Media even after the source material has proven it false.
Captain Ed, you cretin. What part of "partial transcripts" don't you understand?
The transcripts for August 28th and August 29th are not "entire briefings." Aside from the fact that the New York Times article that accompanies the transcripts notes that these are only "Partial Transcripts of the Video Conferences," the html code for the pdf links both say "partia" at the end.
It's certainly fair to knock the A.P. for not showing everything. But it's more than disgenuous to pretend that the "absence of evidence is not evidence of absence."
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