Witt less Press

James Lee Witt is quite the man of the hour. Louisiana managed to hire him before the federal government did. He is considered almost super human, because, while he was director, FEMA managed to avoid being a dumping ground for incompetents for 8 whole years.

Now let's try to remember what the press thought was important about him back then.

Ah yes Al Gore incorrectly stated that he had inspected the sites of Texan wildfires with Witt when, in fact, he had toured them with his deputy, although he visited many disaster sites with Witt. Bob Somerby provides his usual measured evaluation "Gore said he had been to a Texas fire with FEMA director James Lee Witt, the pundit corps howled about it for a week. (He had actually gone with Witt’s top assistant.) Pundits swore that the troubling misstatement showed us that Gore had a character problem."

Googling ["James Lee Witt" Gore] shows how true this is (there is also a whole section in in "Lies and the Lying liars that tell them, a fair and balanced look at the right) . Basically the press made the issue of remembering which disasters one had visited with Witt seem more important than, well whether you would appoint someone like Witt or someone like Brown. The journalists who covered the 2000 campaign in such an idiotic manner should ask themselves if they share part of the blame for deaths in New Orleans.


update:
Billmon noted the irony before I did.