I've been cruising the leftist blogosphere all morning, and have seen every half-assed accusation they've thrown up, and I've answered a number of them.

Your post pretty much distills the Leftist Meme of the Day in a few sentences.
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Frankly, I've had it up to here with pewling little shits who think this is a great opportunity to take more shots at Bush. Don't put yourself on that list.

Aren't you the guy who prides himself on going behind opinion to get at sources? Does a distillation of opinion in the "leftist blogosphere" make the accusation false?

I do agree with Mark's desire that we avoid partisan arguing during this tragedy, though I have mixed feelings about going to the extreme of banishing all other news from CE. It was probably, at a minimum, in bad taste for Don and Bowser to post this stuff in the first place. But they did, and you responded with a partisan attack on the charges, and tried to use them as fodder for taking your own shots at the Left.

I'm trying to cut down the middle and correct the record while avoiding, if possible, inflaming things further. Given that, if you'd like to just ignore me, fine, I won't try to portray it as my victory, and by implication credit will accrue to you for holding your tongue. Let's all keep our eyes on what's really important.

That said, herewith the correction:

You must've read the article on the front page of the Mercury-News today. The article reports the opinions of former members of the Bush Administration itself, and from a wide array of state and local emergency officials, that the Bush Administration shortchanged domestic disaster preparedness to pay for overseas wars. Those opinions weren't ginned up out of nothing by the press as you're trying to imply.

(all the following taken from today's "San Jose Mercury-News"; emphasis added and typos are mine)

"What you're seeing is revealing weaknesses in the state, local, and federal levels, " said Eric Tolbert, who until February was FEMA's disaster-response chief. "All three levels have been weakened. They've been weakened by diversion into terrorism."

The slow response and poor federal leadership is a replay of the mishandling of Hurricane Andrews in 1992, said former FEMA Chief of Staff Jane Bullock, a 22-year agency veteran.

Bullock blamed inexperienced federal leadership. She noted that Chertoff and FEMA Director Michael Brown had no disaster experience before they were appointed to their jobs.

Budget cuts have not made disaster preparedness any easier.

Last year, FEMA spent $250,000 to conduct an eight-day hurricane drill for a mock killer storm hitting New Orleans. Some 250 emergency officials attended. Many scenarios now playing out, including a helicopter evacuation of the Superdome were discussed in that drill for a fictional storm named Pam.

This year, the group was to design a plan to fix such unresolved problems as evacuating sick and injured people from the Superdome and housing tens of thousands of stranded citizens. But funding for that planning was cut, said Tolbert, who also was disaster planning cheif for North Carolina.

"A lot of good was done, but it just wasn't finished," he said. "I don't know if it would have saved more lives. It would have made the response faster. You might say it would have saved lives."

Both the New Orleans Time-Picayune newspaper and a local business magazine reported that the effects of the budget cuts at the Army Corps of Engineers were severe.

In 2004, the Corps essentially stopped major work on the now-breached levee system that had protected New Orleans from flooding. It was the first such stoppage in 37 years, the Times-Picayaune reported.

"It appears that the money has been moved in the president's budget to handle homeland security and the war in Iraq, and I suppose that's just the price we pay," Jefferson Parish emergency-management chief Walter Maestri told the newspaper.

Regarding the ACE, I read your rebuttal to an earlier report of this issue. I have to ask: How does knowing now, with 20/20 hindsight, that a deadly hurricane would hit before the years-long work was done in any way excuse slowing down or even stopping that work? What if Katrina hadn't hit the Gulf, but ten years from now an equivalent storm did? Wouldn't it just be even clearer that the work needed to be done?