Well, it took him two weeks to catch up to the lies his administration was spouting, but Bush has now reiterated the same lie used by Homeland Security chief Chertoff, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Myers, and White House spokesman Scott McClellan.
Bush is now claiming that he didn't realize the hurricane was a big deal because the media said New Orleans had "dodged a bullet."
When that storm came by, a lot of people said we dodged a bullet. When that storm came through at first, people said, Whew. There was a sense of relaxation. And that’s what I was referring to.
And I myself thought we had dodged a bullet. You know why? Because I was listening to people probably over the airwaves say, The bullet has been dodged. And that was what I was referring to.
Of course, there were plans in case the levee had been breached. There was a sense of relaxation at a critical moment.
The problem? Bush is a little slow - that talking point got blown out of the water, oh, about a week ago. You see, the levees broke Monday morning within hours of the storm hitting, so there was no sigh of relaxation that the levees had been saved.
And second of all, most every newspaper said the hurricane was a disaster causing massive devastation, etc. Had Bush looked at the news prior to the Friday evening AFTER, five days AFTER the hurricane hit (true story), he'd have known that fact. But Bush prides himself on not reading newspapers or watching the news, so he was understandably ignorant that an entire American city had just been wiped off the face of the planet.
But as Bush is just playing catch up to the fact that we had a devastating hurricane two weeks ago and lost an entire American city, it's understandable why he's a bit behind on the pre-packaged lies his administration is using to deflect blame away form the fact that Bush was clueless about the full impact of the hurricane until Thursday night, 4 days after the killer storm struck.
The sad part is that the president of the United States is still lying to the American people two weeks after he stayed on vacation while an American city was destroyed.
Oh yeah, and about all those newspapers - that Bush admits he doesn't read anyway, so how did he know what they supposedly said? - claiming that we'd "dodged a bullet":
