Barack Obama tells his backers he will “Fight the Smears,” but last night, he unleashed some juicy smears of his own. I’m referring to this vicious and untrue line:

We are more compassionate than a government that lets veterans sleep on our streets and families slide into poverty; that sits on its hands while a major American city drowns before our eyes.

It was principally the state and local (Democratic) governments that failed in New Orleans — but the vicious myth, so aggressively pounded by the liberal media, puts every milligram of blame on the Bush administration. But the smear goes way beyond that. Start with the brave work of rescuers from the National Guard, who weren’t sitting on their hands, but saved thousands from the floods:

Largely ignored by the agenda-driven national media, one of the largest rescue operations in history saved more than 50,000 people by boat and helicopter. In this Dunkirk on the Mississippi, Coast Guard and other military units, volunteers, and state and local first responders delivered thousands from death by drowning, dehydration, heatstroke, fire, starvation, and disease.

Obama ought to apologize to those rescuers. But then consider how many billions of dollars the federal government has shoveled into the disaster zone there, how taxpayers from New Mexico to Idaho to Maine have sent their tax dollars to Louisiana and Mississippi. Anyone who thinks the American taxpayer didn’t shovel enough billions into those areas, who would still at this late date use wild, arm-waving emotional metaphors about the feds fidding while Nola drowned, should be ashamed of himself.