It’s not difficult these days to identify untruths coming from the White House.  Dubya’s régime has made “truthiness” a part of the American vernacular: saying what one wishes to be true regardless of the facts and what is actually known.

In the spirit of truthiness — and let the facts be damned — it has now come to our attention that the White House lied about Katrina’s impact.

You may remember immediately following the hurricane’s strike the many “statements by President Bush and the homeland security secretary, Michael Chertoff, that no one expected the storm protection system in New Orleans to be breached.”  Everyone in the administration claimed that it was impossible to foresee the devastation in New Orleans, therefore it was also impossible to plan for the catastrophic aftermath which followed.

On September 1, 2005, Bush specifically said, “I don’t think anyone anticipated the breach of the levees. Now we’re having to deal with it, and will.”  What he and his goons failed to admit was that they knew ahead of time the significance of the storm’s impact.

The White House was told in the hours before Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans that the city would probably soon be inundated with floodwater, forcing the long-term relocation of hundreds of thousands of people, documents to be released Tuesday by Senate investigators show.

A Homeland Security Department report submitted to the White House at 1:47 a.m. on Aug. 29, hours before the storm hit, said, “Any storm rated Category 4 or greater will likely lead to severe flooding and/or levee breaching.”

[…]

Other documents to be released Tuesday show that the weekend before Hurricane Katrina made landfall, Homeland Security Department officials predicted that its impact would be worse than a doomsday-like emergency planning exercise conducted in Louisiana in July 2004.

In that drill, held because of common knowledge that New Orleans was susceptible to hurricane-driven flooding, emergency planners predicted that in a Category 3 storm, one million people would be forced to move away, 17 percent of the nation’s oil refining capacity would be knocked out and as many as 60,000 lives might be lost.

“Exercise projection is exceeded by Hurricane Katrina real-life impacts,” the Aug. 27 department report said, two days before the storm hit New Orleans.

As much as I’d like to claim that Bush and cronies were the only folks caught with their britches down by this report, it also contains affirmation of what I have said many times before: every level of government failed to demonstrate any significant planning for such a catastrophe, including Nagin’s idiotic call for the evacuation of New Orleans without providing one bit of help to those who were unable to relocate themselves.

The Senate investigators have also found evidence that at least some federal and state officials were aware last summer that the hurricane evacuation planning in the New Orleans area was incomplete.

“We’re at less than 10 percent done with this trans planning when you consider the buses and the people,” said a summary of a July briefing held with local, state and federal officials regarding a possible hurricane in Louisiana and referring to transportation planning. “If you think soup lines in the Depression were long, wait til you see the lines at these collection points,” the summary said, referring to buses that were supposed to help pick up people to evacuate New Orleans.

Without sounding like a broken record, I’ll say once again that every level of government failed with regards to their Katrina response.  Bush sat on vacation for days before getting off his lame ass and at least pretending to take action.  Nagin ordered his entire city evacuated without one consideration for helping denizens of New Orleans with their escape.  Blanco sat in her ivory tower and barked orders that were too late and too little, finding it easier to point fingers than to take responsibility for her state and ensuring its residents’ safety.  The list goes on.

Sadly, out of all of this I am still most disappointed with the blatant lies told by Bush and the idiots who worship and blindly follow him work for him.  This presidency is undoubtedly the most horrific anti-American force the world has ever seen, robbing the people of their constitutional rights, lying at every opportunity to cover its own illegal and immoral and out-of-touch acts, and generally making the world and our country less secure, and making Americans more hated.  In this case, those lies covered the reckless endangerment of life and property, and yet again Bush et al should be held responsible for their incompetent bumbling and intentional deception with intent to do harm.

With the pitiful likes of the Right in charge, however, that will never happen.  “Let them die!” is all they can say.  I wonder if that’s actually better than the cake.