Billmon:

WASHINGTON (Reuters)—Two key U.S. senators said on Friday they will launch a bipartisan coverup of what they described as an “immense, but probably unavoidable failure” of the government response to Hurricane Katrina.

Sen. Susan Collins, a Maine Republican who heads the Senate Governmental Affairs Committee, and Sen. Joseph Lieberman, the panel’s other top-ranking Republican, said they hope to shift as much blame as possible to lower-ranking officials and career federal employees—ideally at an obscure government agency that few Americans have ever heard of.

“In keeping with recent congressional practice, we will try to shield the president and the senior members of his administration from directly responsibility for this fiasco, although a few token resignations may be required this time around,” the pair said in a joint statement. “Our primary focus, however, will be on figuring out how to throw billions of dollars in additional funding to the very same agencies that failed so spectacularly this past week.”

Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist expressed his own support for a cover up, saying it would follow in the “proud footsteps” of Congress’s refusal to hold anyone accountable for the failure to stop the 9/11 attacks, the completely inadequate investigation into the Abu Ghraib torture abuses, and the Senate Intelligence Committtee’s whitewash of administration efforts to cook the intelligence on weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.

Speaker of the House Denny Hastert declined to comment on the hurricane or the proposed Senate investigation, other than to make a loud “BRRRRRRRR” sound while pushing a toy bulldozer across a map of New Orleans.

In other news, it’s harder and harder to tell the joke fake news from the real.