In the NYT’s front-page levee story today, Eric Lipton incorrectly says that Bush’s feeling that New Orleans had “dodged a bullet” was after he received the alert that the levees had broken on Tuesday. Bush, commenting on his reaction in a September 12th news conference, actually said this:

Bush: 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 airways, say, the bullet has been dodged. And that was what I was referring to.

This is true, as the media coverage Monday night that said that the slight turn of the hurricane spared New Orleans. Former FEMA director Michael Brown said it himself at 10:00 PM Monday night, on CNN:

And I think what we see is, sure, New Orleans dodged the bullet, in the sense that the catastrophic disaster we thought would occur downtown, moved slightly to the east, 30 or 40 miles.

The NYT doesn’t mention this, of course, now that Brown is blasting the administration. The NYT says instead:

The federal government let out a sigh of relief when in fact it should have been sounding an “all hands on deck” alarm, the investigators have found.

Of course Lipton wouldn’t suggest such a thing—just the investigators. In fact, Bush’s first speech on Tuesday said “our priority is on saving lives” and “federal, state and local governments are working side-by-side to do all we can.” This doesn’t sound like a sigh of relief to me.

What’s also strange is that Lipton indicates that the White House knew before they claimed they did. He reports that at midnight (Tuesday) the White House received the report. The White House says that they received the report on Tuesday. Where’s the contradiction?

Also, I looked into it and found that this information, promoted as breaking news, was already reported by Eric Lipton on January 26th—over two weeks ago.

That night, after the storm passed, a report sent to the White House warned of a quarter-mile breach ‘’in the levee near the 17th Street Canal’’ and that ‘’an estimated 2/3 to 75 percent of the city is underwater.’’
Yet Mr. Bush and the homeland security secretary, Michael Chertoff, in interviews after the storm hit, said they never expected the levees to be breached. They said that after the storm had passed Monday, they were convinced that the city had survived without catastrophic damage.

Apparently, the NYT felt the need to re-grind their axe now that Michael Brown has come out against the administration.