Media, Libs Push Phony Murder in New Orleans

RUSH: Let me now take you to a couple sound bites from this anti-American war rally that took place yesterday in Washington, DC. Here is a portion of remarks from the esteemed Democrat from Georgia Cynthia McKinney.
McKINNEY: As dead bodies lay strewn about the New O’eans Superdome, military recruiters blew into Houston’s Astrodome to reap the harvest! (cheers) This ill wins that engulfs our country is also global in its impact! It dips into the Caribbean, hitting Haiti and Cuba! It reached into Latin America to slap Venezuela! (Yeah!) It swept death, greed, and destruction across Africa into eastern Congo! (Yeah!) And it breathes occupation onto the peoples of Iraq and Palestine!
RUSH: I tell you, these are damn powerful hurricanes, folks, to do all that! Cynthia McKinney, here’s one more. We’ll comment on these here in just a second, but here’s her second bite.
McKINNEY: A cruel wind blows across America, starting in Texas and Montana and sweeping across America’s heartland! It settled here in Washington, DC! And despite our presence today, it continues to buffer — to buffet and batter the American people! (cheers) This cruel wind blew disenfranchisement into Florida and Ohio; it blew hard-heartedness into the capitol, division across our land, and wretchedness in high places! (Yeah!) The American people have been forced to endure fraud in the elections of 2000 and 2004, criminal neglect on September 11th, a war started on deliberately faked evidence!
RUSH: That’s Cynthia McKinney doing a pretty good job here of illustrating the mainstream of thought on the American left today and in the American Democrat Party. I think she got confused with her geography. I think she thinks Cheney is from Montana. She cited, Montana, “The ill wind is blowing from Texas and Montana.” He’s from Wyoming. Nevertheless, you had (interruption). I know. Wyoming, Montana, they all look alike. Who can tell the difference, folks? You look at them on a map, they look basically the same shape. They’ve got lines going in the same directions. I mean, how can you possibly tell the different between Wyoming and Montana? Particularly if you come out of the American school system, how you going to know the difference between Montana and Wyoming? They all look alike. It’s even tougher for Colorado and Wyoming. They look alike, too. How you going to know? So we’re not going to hold that against her. But “dead bodies strewn around the New Orleans Superdome”? That we’ve got to tackle and we’ll do that when we come back. (laughing) Stay with us. (laughing) I can’t keep a straight face.
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RUSH: All right, so what was it? Cynthia McKinney at the anti-American war rally said something about the “dead bodies lay strewn about the New Orleans Superdome.” You know, in all candor here, folks, one of the biggest outrages of this whole hurricane has been the totally irresponsible reporting, hysterically irresponsible reporting of the mainstream media. There was a doom-and-gloom, and almost an apocalyptic tone to virtually all the reporting, and whatever anybody happened to say about the worst got passed along as fact — and this has been somewhat questioned over the past two weeks. A bunch of different people have looked into some of these outrageous claims of all the rapes and all the murders at the Superdome, at the Convention Center, all throughout the city in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, so much so that rumor sites — sites that check rumors — got into gear and found out that much of this was just rumor mongering itself. We had one of the officials from one of the parishes on the Meet the Press back on September 4th and told an out-and-on lie about where the timeline was concerned, back on the air Tim Russert sort of read this guy the riot act. His name was Aaron Broussard. But he got away with it the first time because the media cycle — I keep pounding this because it’s true. The media cycle is one thing: “How will this hurt Bush? How can we make it hurt Bush? How can this help Democrats?” Well, of course, the whole media cycle with Hurricane Katrina, regardless of all the other currents that are flowing around, the media cycle was: “This shows that Bush is not at the present time and incompetent and perhaps he’s even a racist and a bigot.”
So all these stories survive and they get amplified, and a lot of people believe it. I think the president’s poll numbers went down because of all this reporting. Well, the New Orleans Times-Picayune weighs in on this today on their website, NOLA.com, and the headline is: “Rumors of Deaths Greatly Exaggerated; Widely Reported Attacks False or Unsubstantiated. Six bodies found at the Superdome, four at the convention center ? After five days managing near-riots, medical horrors and unspeakable living conditions inside the Superdome, Louisiana National Guard Col. Thomas Beron prepared to hand over the dead to representatives of the Federal Emergency Management Agency. Following days of internationally reported killings, rapes and gang violence inside the Dome, the doctor from FEMA – Beron doesn’t remember his name – came prepared for a grisly scene: He brought a refrigerated 18-wheeler and three doctors to process bodies. ‘I’ve got a report of 200 bodies in the Dome,’ Beron recalls the doctor saying. The real total was six. Of those, four died of natural causes, one overdosed and another jumped to his death in an apparent suicide,’ said Beron, who personally oversaw the turning over of bodies from a Dome freezer, where they lay atop melting bags of ice. State health department officials in charge of body recovery put the official death count at the Dome at 10, but Beron said the other four bodies were found in the street near the Dome, not inside it. Both sources said no one had been killed inside. [T]he nation’s front-line emergency management believed the body count would resemble that of a bloody battle in a war is but one of scores of examples of myths about the Dome and the Convention Center treated as fact by evacuees, the media and even some of New Orleans’ top officials, including the mayor and police superintendent. As the fog of warlike conditions in Hurricane Katrina’s aftermath has cleared, the vast majority of reported atrocities committed by evacuees have turned out to be false, or at least unsupported by any evidence, according to key military, law enforcement, medical and civilian officials in positions to know.
“‘I think 99% of it is bulls—,’ said Sgt. 1st Class Jason Lachney, who played a key role in security and humanitarian work inside the Dome. ‘Don’t get me wrong, bad things happened, but I didn’t see any killing and raping and cutting of throats or anything. … Ninety-nine percent of the people in the Dome were very well-behaved.’ … Orleans Parish District Attorney Eddie Jordan said authorities had confirmed only four murders in New Orleans…” and listen to this paragraph because this sums it all up: “Orleans Parish District Attorney Eddie Jordan said authorities had confirmed only four murders in New Orleans in the aftermath of Katrina – making it a typical week in a city that anticipated more than 200 homicides this year. Jordan expressed outrage at reports from many national media outlets that suffering flood victims had turned into mobs of unchecked savages. ‘I had the impression that at least 40 or 50 murders had occurred at the two sites,’ he said. ‘It’s unfortunate we saw these kinds of stories saying crime had taken place on a massive scale when that wasn’t the case. And they (national media outlets) have done nothing to follow up on any of these cases, they just accepted what people (on the street) told them. … It’s not consistent with the highest standards of journalism.'” Really? The only shocking thing about this is that anybody is surprised. This is nothing new: the elevation of bad news, the amplification of bad news, the questionable use of sources. But we know why it happens. We know why it happens. The president did a press conference today — well, a little bitty press conference. He went to announce the status of America’s energy supply, and after he finished what he opened it up to questions, and the first question, I think, came from Nedra Pickler. I think we may even have this. We do. Grab audio sound bite #2. We even have this on tape. This our old buddy Nedra Pickler, from the Associated Press. The president has just finished talk about the status of the nation’s energy supply and distribution system and here’s what Nedra Pickler asked.
PICKLER: I want to ask you about, um, a different result of these storms and that is the racial divide that’s been exposed in the country. Blacks and whites feel very differently about what happened. We all, um, recognize that the response to Rita was much better than the response to Katrina, but there are some strong feelings in the black community that — that difference had a racial component to it, that the white, you know, rural residents got taken care of better than the black urban residents. How do you respond to that?
THE PRESIDENT: Well, I think about Houston — my own hometown of Houston — which is an incredibly diverse city, and we had what looked like a category five hurricane headed right for Houston, and the federal, state and local officials worked together to warn the citizens of the impending storm. But the message wasn’t, you know, sent to one group of people. It was sent to the entire city.

RUSH: Now, the president went on from that point and listed all of the programs that he has sponsored, legislation that he has sponsored and that he has signed designed to elevate poor people out of poverty. He has listed all of the things that he has done that to the average person watching, I don’t think that they would get it, sadly. But his point was to say in as diplomatic and presidential way as possible, “Come on, Nedra, could you get serious? You’re talking about hurricanes that attack based on racism and a federal response based on racism? You actually think this?” He won’t say that. I wish he would. I wish somebody would say to some of these reporters, “Do you really think, do you really think that all the levels of government — state, federal, local, local, local, local included — actually cared less about what happened to their state and their city because a majority of these people that were harmed by it were black? Do you really that believe that?” He didn’t say that. What he did was site a number of legislative programs and initiatives that have sought to strengthen the poor and target those who were African-American in this country with genuine programs that help. It was his way of sort of flicking it aside, and flicking this aside is not really sufficient. You have to nuke this. You have to nuke this whole premise. Well, here we are. We’ve now gone through two hurricanes. This hurricane hit around the 1st of September, Hurricane Katrina vanden Heuvel, and here we are in September 26th, and we are still subjected to questions by the mainstream press: “Was there racism in New Orleans? Is there racism in New Orleans? Is there racism in the federal response?”
(sniveling liberal impression) “Well we’ve got critics, Mr. President. We have critics, critics and some black people are saying the response in Katrina was much slower than it was for Hurricane Rita,” and it is just breathtaking to behold this. These people are not even smart. Some of these reporters don’t even have the ability to think. It is just they get caught in this template, this mind-set. I know it’s purposeful, because they’re all enemies of the president and they want to do everything they can to harm the guy. But it is still, folks, it’s still, as a thinking, engaged human being, it still amazes me — and these are journalists! The lack of genuine curiosity, that they possess. It is just beyond me. So I do this with this order, this New Orleans story, Cynthia McKinney followed by the New Orleans story followed by Nedra Pickler to illustrate. Here you have a Democrat congressperson that’s just literally out of her mind at the anti-American war rally yesterday, literally shouting lunatic things, followed by the New Orleans Times-Picayune, putting the myth to the story of all the horrors, all the rapes, all the murders, all the slit throats, all that savagery that went on. It didn’t happen! Then you go to Nedra Pickler, asking President Bush about that same thing, and, “Is it the federal government’s fault?” It just… I’m slowly running out of adjectives to describe my incredulity.
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RUSH: Calypso Louie is back, the Nation of Islam chief, Calypso Louie, Minister Louis Farrakhan has now expanded on his theory that New Orleans levees were blown up during Hurricane Katrina, announcing Friday that divers working on the levee break had found evidence of explosives. “‘These explosives are from the government side,’ said [Calypso] Louie at a press conference in Memphis held to promote his upcoming Million Man Anniversary March. In quotes picked up by the Memphis TV station WMC, [Calypso] Louie demanded an investigation into the Bush administration’s levee plan.” (laughing) If this weren’t so sad… I mean, it’s hilarious. The frightening thing s you got people like Cynthia McKinney and Calypso Louie and they’ve got an audience, and they’re buying into this. These are Americans and they’re just literally polluting their minds. It’s just like the polling data that came out after Katrina: Nine out of ten white people see no racism whatsoever in anything to do with the response, something like eight out of ten African-Americans do. The African-Americans are the outliers. By the way, it was not just white Americans. It was “other Americans.” All Americans except blacks were asked the question, and then blacks were asked separately. So you’ve got 80, 90% of Americans saying, “Eh, there’s no racism here,” but yet you’ve got, 70, 80% of the African-American population think there was. Now, they’re truly outliers and they’re being led in that fashion. They’ve got people like the Reverend Jackson, and McKinney, to whatever extent that she has influence, John Conyers, Charlie “Bull” Rangel, and now Calypso Louie getting in on the action. He said, “Somebody is guilty, and not only of mass destruction of property, but of mass murder.” Mass murder! What mass murder? We just got through telling you there is not mass death in New Orleans. There wasn’t mass death. There wasn’t moss murder. There wasn’t mass accidental. There wasn’t mass raping. There wasn’t mass gang anything — mass gang anything — going on other than the looting, and that probably was no more than usual in New Orleans anyway. Everything was pretty normal. The death rate, 200 murders a year. They had something like ten total in the aftermath here in the last three weeks. It amortizes out to be about right.
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