If You Can't Trust Stars and Stripes, Who Can You Trust?

So here's an interesting snippet. There was a Republican talking point that the media was to blame for the administration's slow response to Hurricane Katrina. According to Michael Chertoff, Joint Chiefs Chairman General Richard Myers, and recently, President Bush himself, news headlines on the Tuesday after Katrina battered the Gulf Coast misled the government, since the news was reporting that New Orleans had "dodged a bullet." The Wall Street Journal [link], Wonkette [link] and others have ably debunked this, but none that I have seen focused particularly on General Myers.

Here's what the General said, ably repeating the talking point:

The headline, of course, in most of the country's papers on Tuesday were "New Orleans dodged a bullet," or words to that effect. At that time, when those words were in our minds, we started working issues before we were asked...

[snip]

And we started that before the magnitude of this tragedy was even understood by anybody at any level. And so that movement was moving -- working.

The Newseum gives the lie to the General's statement, since it shows dozens of front pages for Tuesday, August 30, 2005, and not one of them says anything remotely like what he said. [link] One newspaper in particular struck me, however, considering that it's Stars and Stripes, the "Department of Defense-authorized daily newspaper." Turns out that the enterprising reporters at Stars and Stripes managed to get the story right, on Tuesday morning, no less. Question for General Myers: what part of "Devastation" and "Hurricane Katrina Ravages Gulf Coast" suggest, even remotely, that New Orleans "dodged a bullet"? [And if he couldn't be concerned about Katrina's civilian impact, is it at least safe to assume that he was advised that a military base had to close? Maybe that could have been a clue that no bullets had been dodged...?]

I don't mean to be a stickler, but if the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff can't read any other actual newspapers out there, is it too much to ask that he at least read the house organ?