White House is good at one thing: lying

The Bush administration may not be good at fighting wars or balancing budgets or putting even marginally competent people in important positions, but it is admittedly brilliant at one thing: spinning the news.

"Spinning," which in less fastidious times was known as "lying," works like this: Sometime this past weekend, the White House decided that the party line in regard to the federal government's catastrophically poor response to Hurricane Katrina would be that local officials had failed to ask for help soon enough.

For example, on Sunday, Sept. 4, the Washington Post ran a story in which it quoted a "senior administration official," who pointed out that as of Saturday Louisiana Gov. Kathleen Blanco had still not declared a state of emergency. Newsweek repeats this claim in this week's edition.

What ineptitude! A state that has been hit by possibly the worst natural disaster in the nation's history, and five days later the governor still hasn't declared a state of emergency? The message coming down from the White House — where the indefatigable Karl Rove and Dan Bartlett have been put in charge of the administration's public relations campaign regarding its response to the drowning of New Orleans — couldn't be much clearer. How can you blame us for critical delays in responding to this disaster, when a bunch of shiftless disorganized Louisiana politicians can't even perform the most basic aspects of their jobs?

The only problem with this claim is that it was totally false. Blanco had declared a state of emergency more than a week earlier, on Aug. 26 — a fact that was a matter of public record, and indeed was so easily checked that the Post ran a correction within hours.

As Josh Marshall at talkingpointsmemo.com points out, this is a perfect example of abuse by and of anonymous sources. It's difficult to believe that this "senior administration official" wasn't aware that he or she was slandering Blanco. But that's hardly an excuse for printing the official's lie as fact: quite the contrary. After all, the Post (and Newsweek) could have easily checked the accuracy of the official's claim, which is another way of saying that there wasn't any need to use an anonymous source in this sort of circumstance at all.