Unbelievable as it may sound, Washington Post columnist Eugene Robinson used the word "reasonable" to describe people who believe Louis Farrakhan's crackpot theory that the levee breaks were deliberate acts of racism. The following is from Robinson's interview on yesterday's Meet the Press:

I was stunned in New Orleans at how many black New Orleanians would tell me with real conviction that somehow the levee breaks had been engineered in order to save the French Quarter and the Garden District at the expense of the Lower Ninth Ward, which is almost all black. You know, I don't for a minute think the Corps of Engineers or the city of New Orleans would be clever enough to do that at this point. But these are not wild-eyed people. These are reasonable, sober people who really believe that.

Sorry, but there is nothing reasonable about believing in something so patently, outrageously, unreasonable. What is unreasonable is Robinson's egregious and irresponsible misuse of the word "reasonable."

Notice also that Robinson doesn't say the government didn't engineer the levee breaks because it would have been an unspeakably monstrous crime; he merely says that they're "not clever enough" to have done it.

Huh?

Not clever enough?

Our government was not clever enough (at least, not "at this point".....) to have deliberately engineered the levee breaks which flooded the city? An atrocity so foul that had Stalin, Hitler, Mao, or the Khmer Rouge done it, they'd have justly been condemned as genocidal?

Gee. The stuff that passes for fairness in the mainstream media.

(I hope Robinson would at least allow that Jewish doctors "aren't clever enough" to inject black babies with AIDS.)

MORE: In another (emotional) "Meet the Press moment," Tim Russert sat by while a local Democratic politician named Aaron Broussard lied blatantly about the timing of a nursing home death.

Russert didn't challenge him, even when he made wild accusations of FEMA "cutting [his parish's] emergency [communication] lines" and ordering the Coast Guard not to give them badly needed fuel.

Hmmm.....

I'm wondering whether "emotion" explains why Russert sat there watching his Washington Post colleague claim it was "reasonable" to think that government racists deliberately blew up the levees (even if he didn't think the latter were clever enough to pull it off.)

(Perhaps I should be glad he didn't second the emotion.)

UPDATE (09/29/05): According to this Newsmax report, Farrakhan's source for theory that the levees were deliberately blown up was none other than Mayor Nagin:

"We flew to Dallas, Texas - members of the Millions More Movement - where we met with Mayor Nagin . . . Mayor Nagin told us there was a 25-foot crater under the levee."

Farrakhan cautioned: "He didn't say there was a bomb. He just said there was a crater," then added: "I say they blew it [up]."

A full five days after Farrakhan cited Nagin as his source for news that not all the levee damage looked natural, Nagin himself has had nothing to say about the levee plot theory - a silence that some see as a tacit endorsement.

Two weeks ago Washington Post columnist Eugene Robinson said that Farrakhan's theory was gaining currency in Nagin's city.

More Farrakhan nonsense here (if you like that sort of thing).