Their Lips Are Moving...

NEW ORLEANS (Reuters) - President George W. Bush accused Congress on Wednesday of shortchanging New Orleans of about $1.5 billion in funds to rebuild levees that were breached by flood waters when Hurricane Katrina struck.

"Congress heard our message about improving the levees but they shortchanged the process by about $1.5 billion dollars," Bush said in a rare attack on members of his own party as he toured the devastated city.

"And so in order to help fulfill our promise on the levees, Congress needs to restore the $1.5 billion to make this a real commitment to inspire the good folks down here that they'll have a levee system that will encourage development and reconstruction," Bush added. ...

Jenny Manley, a spokeswoman for the Senate Appropriations Committee, said that although the White House had announced in a news conference it wanted the full $3.1 billion to go to New Orleans, the official request was never sent to Congress.

"I don't think the blame can be put on Congress," she said.

Details, details. Maybe Andy Card got it mixed up with the paperwork for the line-item veto.

Blaming the lapdog Congress for his own failings, as if blame for the Katrina debacle lived with the legislature and not the executive, that's bold. But the award, in the category of 'Most bald-faced attempt to mislead and deflect blame by attacking someone else' goes to ... Donald Rumsfeld!

From Tuesday's Pentagon briefing:

SEC. RUMSFELD: From what I've seen thus far, much of the reporting in the U.S. and abroad has exaggerated the situation, according to General Casey. The number of attacks on mosques, as he pointed out, had been exaggerated. The number of Iraqi deaths had been exaggerated. ...

Interestingly, all of the exaggerations seem to be on one side. It isn't as though there simply have been a series of random errors on both sides of issues. On the contrary, the steady stream of errors all seem to be of a nature to inflame the situation and to give heart to the terrorists and to discourage those who hope for success in Iraq.

And then I notice today that there's been a public opinion poll reporting that the readers of these exaggerations believe Iraq is in a civil war -- a majority do, which I suppose is little wonder that the reports we've seen have had that effect on the American people.

From today's Washington Post:

BAGHDAD, March 8 -- Days after the bombing of a Shiite shrine unleashed a wave of retaliatory killings of Sunnis, the leading Shiite party in Iraq's governing coalition directed the Health Ministry to stop tabulating execution-style shootings, according to a ministry official familiar with the recording of deaths.

The official, who spoke on the condition that he not be named because he feared for his safety, said a representative of the Shiite party, the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq, ordered that government hospitals and morgues catalogue deaths caused by bombings or clashes with insurgents, but not by execution-style shootings.

A statement this week by the U.N. human rights department in Baghdad appeared to support the account of the Health Ministry official. The agency said it had received information about Baghdad's main morgue -- where victims of fatal shootings are taken -- that indicated "the current acting director is under pressure by the Interior Ministry in order not to reveal such information and to minimize the number of casualties."

Remind me, how can you tell when administration officials are lying?