Tim Russert Promotes Leftist Propaganda...

Among those outraged on the Left about the Federal response to Katrina was Meet the Press's Tim Russert. Usually Russert does his homework and is fair - I think that he might have been just following the mob on the "blame the Feds and Bush" bandwagon. But from his experience in politics he should be one of the first to recognize that FEMA is not a first responder - and that there are strict policies in place whereby local officials have to call the Feds in. He instead gives prime Meet the Press airtime to one Aaron Broussard, president of Jefferson Parish in New Orleans on the September 4th show. I didn't see that part of the show - I had become disgusted at the tone of the show (blame Bush, blame the Feds) and knew I that MTP was going to be ideological rather than informative that week. But others did watch carefully, most notably the blogger WuzzaDem.com, who noted that Mr. Brousard looked a bit scripted and coached as he recalled the ordeal of his boss listening to his mother begging to get out of her nursing home almost a week after the storm hit:

"The guy who runs this building I'm in, emergency management, he's responsible   for everything. His mother was trapped in a St. Bernard nursing home and every   day she called him and said, 'Are you coming, son? Is somebody coming?' And   he said, 'Yeah, Mama, somebody's coming to get you. Somebody's coming to get   you on Tuesday. Somebody's coming to get you on Wednesday. Somebody's coming   to get you on Thursday. Somebody's coming to get you on Friday.' And she drowned   Friday night. She drowned Friday night."

And:

"Sir, they were told like me, every single day, "The cavalry's coming,"   on a federal level, "The cavalry's coming, the cavalry's coming, the   cavalry's coming."

Well, thanks to the work of WuzzaDem, we now find out that Broussard, a Democrat, was lying in an attempt to place blame for the death on the Feds. In fact, MSNBC, Meet the Press's online home, had to issue a correction after the man that Broussard was talking about, Thomas Rodrigue, said that Broussard was 'mistaken' and that the phone calls had happened before the hurricane hit, not after. This places the blame on the local officials and the owners of the nursing home, where the blame really belongs:

"Subsequent reporting identified the man whom Broussard was referring to in the Meet the Press interview as Thomas Rodrigue, the Jefferson Parish emergency services director. Contacted on Friday by MSNBC.com, Rodrigue acknowledged that his 92-year-old mother and more than 30 other people died in the St. Rita nursing home. They had not been evacuated and the flood waters overtook the residence.

The chronology of the phone calls described by Broussard came under particular scrutiny by bloggers.

Rodrigue said he didn’t see or hear Broussard’s comments on Meet the Press. When told of the sequence of phone calls that Broussard described on Meet the Press, Rodrigue said “No, no, that’s not true.”

“I can’t tell you what he said that day, why he was confused, I’m assuming he was under a tremendous amount of pressure,” Rodrigue told MSNBC.

“I contacted the nursing home two days before the storm [on Aug. 27^th] and again on the 28^th of August,” Rodrigue said.  “At the same time I talked to the nursing home I also talked to the emergency manager for St. Bernard Parish,” Rodrigue said, “to encourage that nursing home to evacuate like they were supposed to and they didn’t until it was too late.”

Broussard must have been confused “because I was calling, not my mother calling me, I was calling her,” Rodrigue said.  Further, Rodrigue says he never made any calls after Monday, the day he figures his mother died, based on conversations he’s had with another person who had a family member perish inside St. Rita’s. Officials believe that the residents of St. Rita’s died on Monday, Aug. 29, not on Friday, Sept. 2, as Broussard had suggested.

Broussard could not be reached for comment Friday, but Jackie Bauer, a spokeswoman for Broussard who was present during the Meet the Press interview, said "it was a misunderstanding."

I wonder if Tim Russert will give a prominent space on this upcoming Meet the Press to correct the record. Somehow I doubt it. Then it wouldn't fit the narrative that Russert, and the rest of the MSM, is  attempting to sell us.