Bush: Not time for blame game, but let's blame environmentalists

The President keeps saying it's not the time to play the blame game (Jon Stewart says the people who don't want to play are usually to blame), but the feds are getting their ducks in a row, so to speak.

A Jackson, Mississippi newspaper reports that the US Dept. of Justice is looking for "evidence" to pin the blame for New Orleans flooding on environmental groups.

The Clarion-Ledger has obtained a copy of an internal e-mail the U.S. Department of Justice sent out this week to various U.S. attorneys' offices: "Has your district defended any cases on behalf of the (U.S.) Army Corps of Engineers against claims brought by environmental groups seeking to block or otherwise impede the Corps work on the levees protecting New Orleans? If so, please describe the case and the outcome of the litigation."

The e-mail confirms what the Sierra Club had already reported in its online newsletter -- The Bush administration is trying to scapegoat enviros:

The Bush administration thought it could make up for its embarrassing performance in emergency management with a tried-and-true exercise in image management. In Karl Rove's playbook, that meant find someone to "Swift Boat," as New York Times columnist Frank Rich would say.

By September 8, Rove's smear machine was in full swing. The National Review online ran an article by John Berlau, a journalism fellow at the Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI), the well known think tank, "dedicated to advancing the principles of free enterprise and limited government." The article suggested that environmentalists were responsible for the terrible flooding that New Orleans endured because they had opposed a major levee project along the Mississippi River in 1996. That story was immediately echoed by Fox News and right wing commentators and bloggers from coast to coast.

Missing from these reports was the fact that the project was 100 miles North of New Orleans and would have offered no defense to Katrina. That's not all: conservation groups never opposed the levees themselves; just the fact that thousands of acres of wetlands were going to be mined for construction material. And it wasn't just conservation groups who objected; even the Louisiana Legislature voiced concerns. The case, by the way, was settled one year later, but the Corps never had the funding to move ahead on the project.