President Bush, answering taking questions yesterday morning:

Q Did they misinform you when you said that no one anticipated the breach of the levees?

THE PRESIDENT: No, what I was referring to is this. 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.

Of course, there were plans in case the levee had been breached. There was a sense of relaxation in the moment, a critical moment. And thank you for giving me a chance to clarify that.

Well, I'm certainly glad he was relaxed.  (Because he's been working hard, thanking people!)  But it doesn't quite add up.  The levees were breached on Monday morning (or afternoon, depending on who you read; the Wall Street Journal ran an excellent article yesterday dissecting the coverage.)  In this post below, I point out that on Sunday, Bush was briefed on Hurricane Katrina by Max Mayfield, director of the National Hurricane Center.  I would be very surprised if such a briefing did not at least include the possibility of a catastrophic levee breach.  And water was flowing over the levees late Sunday night, according to this timeline from ThinkProgress.  (According to Knight-Ridder, the levees failed at 3am Monday.)

So Bush was enjoying "a sense of relaxation(" in a decidedly "critical moment"...after the levees had been overtopped and breached.  Because he was on vacation, you see.  And to this President, nothing seems quite so sacrosanct as months and months of vacation.  Nothing must intrude, whether it be President's Daily Briefings warning of bin Laden attacks, or the news that one of America's key cities was being inundated.

And who, exactly, was telling Bush that they'd "dodged a bullet"?  Was it Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff?  After all, he said (on the September 4 edition of Meet The Press):

I remember on Tuesday morning picking up newspapers and I saw headlines, "New Orleans Dodged The Bullet," because if you recall the storm moved to the east and then continued on and appeared to pass with considerable damage but nothing worse.  It was on Tuesday that the levee--may have been overnight Monday to Tuesday--that the levee started to break.  And it was midday Tuesday that I became aware of the fact that there was no possibility of plugging the gap and that essentially the lake was going to start to drain into the city.  I think that second catastrophe really caught everybody by surprise. 

So, no, the storm wasn't a direct hit on New Orleans.  But it didn't have to be a direct hit, as we have seen, to have caused catastrophic damage and widespread devastation.  (By the way, I would be remiss if I didn't note that Chertoff seemed to be 24 hours behind the National Guard in not knowing that the levees had broken.)

Which brings us back to exactly what was happening on Prairie Chapel Ranch on Tuesday morning.  According to both Secretary Chertoff and President Bush, the press was reporting that New Orleans had "dodged the bullet."

Really?

I see no "New Orleans Dodges Bullet" headline above.  (Graphic from AmericaBlog, by way of Chuck @ Looka.)  But reading comprehension is probably a bit much to expect from the Commander-in-Chief, right?  Because he's proud of not reading newspapers anyway.

And it took at least another 24 hours for Bush to cut his vacation short.  After all, he just loves to clear brush from his ranch.  I'm sure he assumed that cleaning up the Gulf States would be similar.

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[arto]

You know, if only Golden Books had rushed "Smiley the Duck Loses His Home and Family In Hurricane Katrina" to press a little quicker, maybe none of this needed to happen.