So I was watching CNN last night as Anderson Cooper talked about the continuing flooding along the Mississippi River. On comes a correspondent who delivers a report in which CNN seems to be saying that it’s all the government’s fault.

Specifically, the government - as in FEMA - didn’t require businesses or homeowners to purchase federal flood insurance in the event of a 500-year flood. And now that we’ve got a flood the likes of which Sioux Indians never saw, the fact that those washed out didn’t have said flood insurance is all FEMA’s fault!

Nonsense.

Call this stupid journalism tricks, in which we journalists seek desperately to pin the blame for something on the big, unresponsive federal government. In doing so we stick up for the “little guy” who, the insinuation goes, would have eagerly purchased federal flood insurance had “The Government” advised him to do so.

“Are you kidding me?” says the wife, who used to work in the mortgage industry, as we watched the report. “Do you know how much people complain when they’re required to buy flood insurance?” And that’s in flood-prone areas; people simply don’t want to pay for something they’re not 100 percent certain they’d use.

If FEMA had had the gall to require all of these people to buy flood insurance, they might be glad now, but they would have b*tched to high heaven then. The burdensome government with its expensive mandates! You know the drill.

Now Chris Dodd, D-Connecticut, wants to require everyone living in an area protected by a levee to have flood insurance. And in the wake of what’s happening now, perhaps that’s warranted.

But the idea that the federal government somehow failed in its responsibility to predict a 500-year flood, and is thus responsible for the damage these people have suffered is ridiculous. Unless you’re talking about a federal government which could have realized the ramifications of climate change years ago but failed to act because it didn’t want to cause the economic dislocation that “acting” could have triggered. But that’s not what CNN was talking about. By almost all accounts - unlike Hurricane Katrina - FEMA has been more or less on the ball. But that’s not enough for CNN, which apparently thinks the government should foresee disasters, or have every possible 500-year eventuality covered. That’s just a little too easy. Which, probably, is why the story got done in the first place.