Getting it wrong and right at the same time

Most of us were pleased with the current Time Magazine article by Michael Grunwald because it goes further than most national media coverage toward describing the Flood of 2005 as a failure of federally designed infrastructure rather than a fated natural event. I was particularly happy with Grunwald's blunt language as I believe these are arguments that have not been set before a national audience with the amount of... um.. aggression befitting their urgency. But it is worth noting that while Grunwald has done better than most national reporters, he still makes some major errors in judgment.

For instance, he seems to go out of his way to attain an appearance of political balance as he cherry picks for evidence of local government failures to match those of the Feds and for Republican failures to match those of Democrats and so forth. And while he finds demonstrably questionable actions on the part of all his subjects, he distorts their relative weights in order to arrive at a "balanced" product. I think this is how he arrives at some of the conclusions that troubled Matt McBride in this comment to Oyster Matt's comment to Oyster the other day,

Just realize that while there's a lot of words, there's not a lot of "there" there. How one can tell the story of how the Corps has screwed up without telling the story of the pumps (and going on the unexplained tangent of slamming Morganza to the Gulf) makes no sense to me.

Another bit of evidence that he took the easy way out on his research is the reductivist way he deals with local opposition to flodgates back in the 1970's and 1980's, dismissing legitimate cost concerns (the local share of the floodgates would have bankrupted the Orleans Levee District and the Sewerage & Water Board), simply waving his hands by characterizing the locals with

"Stingy local officials actually helped scuttle a Corps plan to build pumps and floodgates along Lake Pontchartrain, a plan that could have prevented much of Katrina's flooding."

It's way more complicated than that. Hes parrotting the Corps line, and I can practially guarantee he got that "information" from Bedey.

This morning, on WWL radio, Grunwald continued in this vein making the following statements.

• Bush is right to veto the WRDA



• The Morganza-to-the-Gulf project is a "boondoggle"



• Col. Bedey "seems like a pretty good guy" and is "building the pumps that should have been built a long time ago"

While there are some very welcome things about this article and I hope its overall tone helps to convince some people that we are deserving of more attention here, I think it would be a mistake to simply tell folks to read it without pointing out its shortcomings.