From the Guardian UK:
The president flew to Baton Rouge and visited a church relief centre to talk to survivors and relief workers.
"All levels of the government are doing the best they can," he said, before flying on to visit another devastated community along the coast in Mississippi. "So long as any life is in danger, we've got work to do."
Many of the evacuees at the centre remained unimpressed. Mildred Brown, who has been there since Tuesday with her husband, mother-in-law and cousin, told the Associated Press: "I'm not interested in hand-shaking. I'm not interested in photo ops. This is going to take a lot of money."
Bald-faced lying has worked pretty well as a game plan for Rove, Bush, Cheney et al thus far, and the media has been only to happy to play along. People can hear that the person who leaked Valerie Plame's CIA identity "will be fired," but then time passes, and...is Tom Cruise nutty or what?! People can hear "the insurgency is in its last throes," but then time passes, and 5,000 miles away and...hey, what about that runaway bride, huh?! People can even hear "The evidence indicates that Iraq is reconstituting its nuclear weapons program," but years pass, and reasons for war shift, and, well...how about that Michael Jackson verdict?!
This time, though, Karl, it's different. It's not 5,000 miles away. It's not a slightly complicated story about spys and ambassadors. It's not years of slow and steady failure to find WMDs. This time, it's dead Americans floating in American waters, it's one of America's greatest cities drowned, it's corpses being eaten by rats, and it's in our face, 24/7...and it's not going away. Sorry, Karl, but you can't throw a curtain over an entire region. You can't pretend MILLIONS of people don't exist.
You can't deny over 10,000 funerals.
The "Boy Genius" is supposed to be a brilliant political strategist. But his one-size-fits-all brand of problem solving isn't working anymore, and any journalist who gets within a mile of this incident doesn't seem like they're going to play along. The jig is up.
I bet Karl wishes he'd never let Judy Miller go to jail now.