This morning, Eric Boehlert demonstrated that “the Beltway press ... hatched the bogus 'Obama's Katrina' meme”:

That speculation-as-news approach then allowed the AP's Woodward -- based on no actual reporting -- to wonder out loud, “Will this be Obama's Katrina?” Keep in mind, nobody quoted or mentioned in the article ever raised the Katrina specter. That was introduced by the AP, and the AP alone. So with the help of the AP, the “Obama's Katrina” ball began to roll.

...

It probably shouldn't have to be noted, but I'll do it here anyway: Journalists are supposed to be in the business of reporting news, not manufacturing it. But in this case, the “Obama's Katrina” angle appeared to be too alluring for journalists to ignore and to not manufacture.

The comparison of the Obama administration's response to the BP oil spill to Bush's handling of Hurricane Katrina is so fundamentally absurd, it can only be made by whitewashing Bush's shameful record.

The Christian Science Monitor, for example, summarized “the Bush administration's outwardly out-of-touch response to hurricane Katrina”:

Bush visited the disaster zone five days after Katrina hit. If Obama arrives in Louisiana on Sunday, nine days will have passed since the Coast Guard announced the leak.

So, according to the Christian Science Monitor, the Bush administration was guilty merely of an “outwardly out-of-touch” response -- though Bush made it to the disaster zone faster than Obama!

That's insane.

The problem with the Bush administration's handling of Katrina wasn't that it was “outwardly out-of-touch” -- it was that it was disastrously inept and breathtakingly dishonest. And it wasn't helped by the fact that Bush put a staggeringly unqualified horse trainer in charge of FEMA.

But, in order to pretend that Barack Obama's response to the recent oil spill has anything at all in common with George Bush's response to Katrina, the press has to gloss over all that, and pretend that Bush just seemed a little out-of-touch. This is only the most recent example of the media whitewashing Bush's disastrous presidency. Last week, I noted the remarkably sanitized language McClatchy used to describe Bush's Iraq legacy.

Here's an indication of just how watered-down the descriptions of Katrina have been in recent “Obama's Katrina” stories: Michael Brown has only been mentioned once:

Number of Nexis hits for “Obama's Katrina” in the past month: 97

Number of Nexis hits for “Obama's Katrina AND Michael Brown” in the past month: 1