Why the retired CBS Honcho Decided to Switch to Fox News

It’s impossible to know precisely where a hurricane will strike land, or where the devastation will fall. If you put your emergency supplies and people too close to the hardest-hit area, then they, too, might be damaged or killed. If you place them too far away, they’ll be unable to reach the affected area in time, if at all. Placement of resources does not appear to have been the problem. Use of them, however, was a different story

writes Joe Mariani, a free-lance writer (many thanks to Molly) one of whose five lessons from the disaster is as follows:

There’s a reason we pay state and municipal taxes, and it isn’t so that our elected officials can sit on their hands and wait for Uncle Sam to bail us out of a crisis. For every inch of red tape in a city bureaucracy, there’s a foot of it at the state level, and a mile at the federal level. Emergencies demand swift action and clear communication to avoid the sort of chaos that Katrina has left in her wake.

Otherwise, a former vice president of both CBS and Gannett (Lee Ellis) explains why he has decided to forsake MSM outlets like his own station, NBC, and CNN for that totally unserious, unbelievable, and untrustworthy spewer of propaganda, Fox News:

Watching both Fox and NBC after President Bush had been inspecting the Gulf Coast and New Orleans, I was shocked at how the nets and even some newspapers were trying to blame the Bush Administration for the slowness of help reaching these damaged cities. Obviously, Brian Williams and his news team do not know the laws nor do they know the past history of New Orleans, the city built in a bathtub of a swamp.

This is a city where the dead, for centuries, have had to be buried in above-ground structures because the water is so close to the surface of this sinking city. If coffins are put in the ground, they will rise to the surface as the underground water pushes them up. I have been to these cemeteries personally.

“Why did it take five days for Bush to help” has been the mantra voiced constantly by all the “Talking Heads” on TV. Here are the reasons.

1. It is against the law for any president to order troops into a city or across state lines without a request and permission from the Governor of that state.

John Armor, a First Amendment lawyer and one of my favorite writers, told me, “Federal law prevents the president from sending in the National Guard until the governor gives the order. It is little known, but the commanding general of the National Guard in every state reports to the governor, not the president, until the governor says otherwise. U.S. military units (regular Army, not the Guard) cannot be used because of the Posse Comitatus law, until the Guard has been authorized."

After listing three other reasons, Lee Ellis concludes that

Bill O’Reilly was the only commentator that I heard who explained this on Fox News. All other network commentators seemed to allow the implication inferred by the viewers that this was all the fault of the Bush Administration. I guess the far left also works in mysterious ways!

Now you know that my television is turned to Fox News and why I no longer listen to NBC or its aide-de-camp, MSNBC!