On September 4th, one Aaron Broussard, president of Jefferson Parish in New Orleans, appeared on Meet the Press and recounted a story which seemed to crystallize much of the anger about the federal response to Hurricane Katrina. A colleague of his had received repeated phone calls from his nursing-home-bound mother, in the days following the hurricane, asking when help was going to arrive. The colleague assured his mom that help was on its way. Day after day she called, until finally, on Friday, just about 5 days after the hurricane had passed, she drowned. Broussard cried on national television as he recounted the story.

Only one problem: the story is not true, as explained in this MSNBC article titled “An Emotional Moment and a Misunderstanding.”

The mother in question died on Monday - the day of the hurricane and its immediate aftermath. And she didn’t call her son with pleadings for help: he had telephoned her, in the days preceding the storm. And she died because the nursing home owners failed to evacuate as they had been directed to do. Those owners have now been indicted in the wake of the deaths of “more than 30″ of the residents.

I am writing a post about this at all mainly to acknowledge the sharpness of one of RWB’s readers, M.W., who, the day after what we now know to be Broussard’s grotesque pantomime on Meet the Press, e-mailed to say he felt it was extremely fishy - based largely on his astute knowledge of human nature. The story just didn’t “ring true;” how could a son sit day after day receiving such calls from his mother and not physically go to help her? I commented that, though it would not be tasteful to go after someone on such a subject, what a Kodak moment (do we still have those in the digital age?) it would be if the story turned out to be made-up.

Ahhh … but not purposefully made-up, of-course: MSNBC helpfully assure us that it was but “an emotional moment and a misunderstanding.”

And I’m sure it was - as was, no doubt, Dan Rather’s story on George W. Bush’s National Guard records last September. They get so darned emotional that they just misunderstand everything.

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