Following in line with their blame Bush style of reporting, the New York Times has an article today titled “Kansas Tornado Renews Debate on Guard at War“. The “news article”, which was presented as more of an editorial against President Bush, and the war in Iraq ignored many facts in order to demonize the Government’s “failure”.

Blaming a slow Government response time on equipment and troops overseas, the New York Times actually went as far as to associate the Kansas tornado with hurricane Katrina. Unfortunately for the New York Times however, their story was printed one day too late, as their “it’s Bush’s fault” theme has already been debunked.

Yesterday morning the Associated Press reported Sam Brownback disputed these claims

Brownback said Tuesday that local officials and the Kansas National Guard commander all told him they have the resources needed to respond.

“That’s what really got me, is her saying that,” Brownback said in an interview.

“So I asked, privately and publicly, the adjutant general, do you have the equipment you need?” he said. “Because if you don’t, we’re going to hit Fort Riley and McConnell (Air Force Base) and other places to make sure we have all the equipment we need to respond to disasters. Everybody there said no, we have the equipment we needed.”

He added: “I think what we need to do is to focus on what we need here now, and not draw a broader political question in. We’ve got a disaster, and we need to all pull together to get everything we need from the state and the federal for the local need.”

In case the New York Times missed that press release, the White House held a press conference yesterday:

Fran Townsend called the Governor just a few minutes ago. There are two separate issues. A number of states have expressed concerns about National Guard levels into the future, and they have talked about Iraq deployments; we’re aware of those. It’s one of the reasons why the President talked about expanding the military, in part to take pressure off National Guard units, and of course, National Guard expansion is part, also, of longer-term planning.

But as a separate issue, the question is, were resources available? And so Fran had a conversation and I’ll just play out a little — just repeat a little bit of it. Fran said that it was her understanding that we’d met every request the Governor had made, and had moved resources proactively into Kansas, into the region, to anticipate requests. We had a conversation this morning, for instance, about notifications and declarations. There were some conversations on Saturday prior to the Governor’s officially requesting a declaration, and on the basis of those conversations, the federal government began moving assets into the region before paperwork was done, because it was important — as a matter of fact, FEMA had resources moving in within a couple of hours.

So there was a very — this is a success story in the sense that people were moving very quickly to get assets there. So, in response to Fran’s question, the Governor said that she had what she needs. She did repeat her testimony that she’s been raising the issue about DOD for a number of years in terms of National Guard deployments. When Fran again said, “Is there anything you need to respond effectively to this disaster,” the Governor responded, “No. We could not have asked for a faster response. Dave Paulison was terrific yesterday.”

Could not have asked for a faster response?? So what’s the problem?

Hat Tip Stop The ACLU

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Iraq, Politics