Lies, damned lies, and Charles Krauthammer

Charles Krauthammer insists that blaming Bush for the broken levees is akin to pogroms against the Jews. Following the script cobbled together by Karl Rove, the columnist spews a series of rapid-fire falsehoods:

There is no relationship between global warming and the frequency and intensity of Atlantic hurricanes. Period. The problem with the evacuation of New Orleans is not that National Guardsmen in Iraq could not get to New Orleans but that National Guardsmen in Louisiana did not get to New Orleans. As for the Bush tax cuts, administration budget requests for New Orleans flood control during the five Bush years exceed those of the five preceding Clinton years.

The last claim is an outright lie:

Yet after 2003, the flow of federal dollars toward SELA dropped to a trickle. The Corps never tried to hide the fact that the spending pressures of the war in Iraq, as well as homeland security -- coming at the same time as federal tax cuts -- was the reason for the strain.

And even that isn't really true. Despite the war and the tax reductions, red state legislators kept bringing home pork, pork and more pork.

Krauthammer's assertions about global warming are similarly absurd. From Time:

But it's that meteorological arcana that's made such a mess of the bayou, and to hear a lot of people tell it, we have only ourselves -- and our global-warming ways -- to blame.

You'll also want to check out this interview with hurricane expert Kerry Emmanuel:

There is a body of theory that's been developed over the last 20 years that suggests that the intensity, as measured by, say, the maximum wind speeds in the hurricane, should go up if you warm the tropical oceans. And the calculations we did suggested that for every degree centigrade of warming of the tropical oceans, you might get about a 5% increase in the peak winds. The data, when people started to look at the historical hurricane data, the first thing you look at is the frequency of events. That is, how many hurricanes occur every year around the world, and if you look at that, you don't see any trend. It's a fairly constant number. There are about 90 storms worldwide per year, and that's not changing very much. So, what we thought a few years ago was, well, global warming should have an effect on hurricanes, but it's small enough that you won't really see it for many decades to come.

When we looked at this other measure of total energy consumption by hurricanes, we were a bit surprised to see a much bigger trend than one had expected. And in hindsight, part of the reason for that is that these storms seem to be lasting longer. That is, they're maintaining high intensity for a longer period of time, and this is certainly contributing to this.

Give me one good reason why I should believe that Charles Krauthammer knows more about hurricanes than Kerry Emmanuel does.

Krauthammer's's lie about the National Guard is the most inane of all, one which is easily exposed by any number of news accounts and web sites. This Swing State Project page reprints a relevant story from ABC:

JACKSON BARRACKS -- When members of the Louisiana National Guard left for Iraq in October, they took a lot equipment with them. Dozens of high water vehicles, humvees, refuelers and generators are now abroad, and in the event of a major natural disaster that, could be a problem.

"The National Guard needs that equipment back home to support the homeland security mission," said Lt. Colonel Pete Schneider with the LA National Guard.

Give me one reason why I should believe that Charles Krauthammer knows more about the National Guard than Lt. Colonel Schneider does.

There are many more stories on the net exposing Krauthammer's's buncombe, but why bother? The pattern is clear. The rightists feel -- with some justification -- that they can fib their way out of any debacle.