The Karl Rove obfuscation tactic explained:

Sierra Club Raw

Issue #129, September 15, 2005
Welcome to the Machine
Eric Antebi, RAW Contributor

When Hurricane Katrina ripped through the Gulf Coast, it not only burst through the best storm defenses the region had. It also tore a gaping hole in the myth that our government, especially our federal government, was prepared to manage a major emergency. The media and public reaction was brutal and rightfully so, after President Bush and his aides completely miscalculated the threat and mishandled the aftermath.

The Bush administration thought it could make up for its embarrassing performance in emergency management with a tried-and-true exercise in image management. In Karl Rove's playbook, that meant find someone to "Swift Boat," as New York Times columnist Frank Rich would say.

By September 8, Rove's smear machine was in full swing. The National Review online ran an article by John Berlau, a journalism fellow at the Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI), the well known think tank, "dedicated to advancing the principles of free enterprise and limited government." The article suggested that environmentalists were responsible for the terrible flooding that New Orleans endured because they had opposed a major levee project along the Mississippi River in 1996. That story was immediately echoed by Fox News and right wing commentators and bloggers from coast to coast.

Missing from these reports was the fact that the project was 100 miles North of New Orleans and would have offered no defense to Katrina. That's not all: conservation groups never opposed the levees themselves; just the fact that thousands of acres of wetlands were going to be mined for construction material. And it wasn't just conservation groups who objected; even the Louisiana Legislature voiced concerns. The case, by the way, was settled one year later, but the Corps never had the funding to move ahead on the project.

The second volley came on September 9, when the House Resources Committee sent out a press release accusing environmentalists of derailing a massive barrier to protect New Orleans three decades ago. That story got retold by the Washington Times earlier this week and similarly found its way onto a host of other blog and conservative commentary sites. Never mind that the project also drew widespread local opposition from affected communities. Or that a Federal Judge chastised the Army Corps of Engineers for doing shoddy work and demanded the agency to provide more information. Or that the Corps never did provide the info and years later it abandoned the project on its own.

The Bush/Rove strategy of course is to use the loyal soldiers in its propaganda army to create another storm that the mainstream media couldn't resist covering. Fact and fiction become impossible to separate, and a new myth is born. Even if the administration can't fix its image, at least it will have redefined the problem in ways that further its anti-environmental goals.

The Bush administration has so far met its match with the unfiltered images and stories of desperate people abandoned by their government. I am counting on ordinary people, angry and armed with the truth, to once again throw a wrench in the administration's machine.