Never Too Busy to Spin

It seems like shooting fish in a barrel to criticize a Fox News Channel report on this site, but I've normally found Brit Hume's 6 p.m. "Special Report" -- an odd name for a program that airs daily -- to be relatively cant-free. Yet today's report by Jim Angle on the Hurricane Wilma recovery had a pointed note -- Angle approvingly compared Florida Gov. Jeb Bush's "blame me" strategy with the complaints from Louisiana after Katrina aimed at the Feds. The implicit message: in Florida, even though more people there lost electricity than in Louisiana as Angle pointed out, they know how to be grownups.

To which, two notes: there have been no reports of Florida first responders losing communication capability during Wilma, which is one of the factors crippling state and local response to Katrina; and, as the series of reports we've linked to here have indicated, there is growing evidence of long-term Federal responsibility for the major damage wrought by Katrina -- the Corps of Engineers refusal to take into account the weakness of the soil undergirding the 17th St. Canal floodwall, and the Corps' insistence on keeping the MRGO channel open despite widespread predictions it would act as a storm-surge funnel to town. By the way, those reports, which have appeared in major newspapers, have not yet crossed the video barrier: I've seen no sign of the results of these early forensic studies on TV, where the voters hang out. So Angle's angle is hitting virgin ears.

There may be other explanations for Jeb Bush's adjuration to lay off criticism of FEMA. But, with a White House beset with other troubles, did a message go down to Big Brother to take a bullet for the team on this one?