Race card? Try playing the whole race deck.

Last week, I mentioned in one post that there had been rumors of rapes and murders in the chaos following Katrina, but nothing had been substantiated. I left it at that. Because, you know, the idea isn't to report on rumors, but verifiable information. Alas, many on the right have no such scruples. From the embarrassingly racist Council of Conservative Citizens:

Updates! Eyewitness accounts report that at least six people have been murdered inside the superdome. One dozen or more have been raped. Most of the rape victims are very young. A seven year old girl, an eight year old boy, and numerous teenage girls. The US media is extremely reluctant to report any of this because of political correctness!

In fact, none of these reports have been verified yet. Still. Even Michelle Malkin acknowledges that "some of the stories being circulated" aren't going to hold up. Never mind the waffling addition of "some." I'm sure there have been some awful crimes committed there, but we're talking about a handful of people out of one million who're now homeless.

Never mind the continued insistence by the right that the real problem is the criminal mindset of those in New Orleans (wink, nudge) and their immediate devolution into, shall we say... jungle savages. The GOP has been making massive efforts to woo minority voters, and the reaction to and coverage of this disaster by the right should remind everyone that being a dark-skinned Republican is akin to being a deer in the NRA. Unless you're a very wealthy deer. Then you'll be taken care of.

UPDATE: The Guardian writes today that there's still no confirmation of these horrors:

There were two babies who had their throats slit. The seven-year-old girl who was raped and murdered in the Superdome. And the corpses laid out amid the excrement in the convention centre.

In a week filled with dreadful scenes of desperation and anger from New Orleans following Hurricane Katrina some stories stood out.

But as time goes on many remain unsubstantiated and may yet prove to be apocryphal.

New Orleans police have been unable to confirm the tale of the raped child, or indeed any of the reports of rapes, in the Superdome and convention centre. . . .

By the end of last week the media in Baton Rouge reported that evacuees from New Orleans were carjacking and that guns and knives were being seized in local shelters where riots were erupting. . . .

The trouble, wrote Howard Witt of the Chicago Tribune is that "scarcely any of it was true - the police confiscated a single knife from a refugee in one Baton Rouge shelter".

"There were no riots in Baton Rouge. There were no armed hordes."