It seems like the administration is going to participate in the finger pointing… Chertoff (head of the Dept. of Homeland Security) was on TV saying this:

MR. RUSSERT: People were stunned by a comment the president of the United States made on Wednesday, Mr. Secretary. He said, “I don’t think anyone anticipated the breach of the levees.” How could the president be so wrong, be so misinformed?

SEC’Y CHERTOFF: Well, I think if you look at what actually happened, I remember on Tuesday morning picking up newspapers and I saw headlines, “New Orleans Dodged The Bullet,” because if you recall the storm moved to the east and then continued on and appeared to pass with considerable damage but nothing worse. It was on Tuesday that the levee–may have been overnight Monday to Tuesday–that the levee started to break. And it was midday Tuesday that I became aware of the fact that there was no possibility of plugging the gap and that essentially the lake was going to start to drain into the city. I think that second catastrophe really caught everybody by surprise. In fact, I think that’s one of the reasons people didn’t continue to leave after the hurricane had passed initially. So this was clearly an unprecedented catastrophe. And I think it caused a tremendous dislocation in the response effort and, in fact, in our ability to get materials to people.

I don’t think this needs much commentary, but if you want, Wonkette is as funny as can be on this subject.

I’d rather just point you all at the Newseum archive of Tuesday’s front pages.

And, I’ll leave you with this question: Why lie about this?

(and there are other incidents, like the state of emergency anonymous comment and other stuff…)