Kevin McGill, an Associated Press writer based in New Orleans, put up a piece over the weekend which is an exercise in hagiography you’ve got to see to believe. Who knew that Mitch Landrieu was a saint?

Former New Orleans Mayor Mitch Landrieu left office nearly four years ago, winning national accolades for removing landmark Confederate monuments after jump-starting the recovery from Hurricane Katrina’s catastrophic levee failures and flooding.

Once considered a possible presidential contender, Landrieu is back in a big way. He was tapped this week by President Joe Biden, a fellow Democrat, to coordinate more than $1 trillion in national infrastructure spending. His job, Biden said Thursday: “Making sure that everything gets out and it goes where it’s supposed to go.”

“He’s the perfect person for this job,” said Walter Isaacson, the New Orleans-born historian, journalist and author who played a role in Katrina recovery efforts. “He loves the geeky details of infrastructure and he loves bringing people together for great projects.”

Andy Kopplin, a deputy mayor under Landrieu and chief of staff to two former Louisiana governors, said Landrieu’s skill with logistics will be a strength in his new role.

“There will be a thousand billion-dollar projects in this trillion dollar bill,” Kopplin said. “He was always focused on having the resources hit the ground at the right time, and that’s what’s critical with the coordination that he’s going to be tasked with.”

Landrieu’s administration wiped out a nearly $100 million deficit and drew billions of dollars in federal aid to step up a plodding recovery from Katrina under former Mayor Ray Nagin, who later went to prison for corruption.

Under Landrieu, New Orleans secured federal money for repair and revitalization of fire and police stations, libraries, school buildings, roads and drainage and public recreation areas that were devastated when federally built levees failed during the storm. Landrieu also led development of a new state-of-the-art international airport, something state and city leaders had been talking about for decades.

It goes on, telling one whopper after another. McGill – whose LinkedIn says he’s a “newsperson,” whatever that is – seems to want the reader to believe that Landrieu actually accomplished the rebuilding of New Orleans after Katrina.

New Orleans’ post-Katrina economic boom was well underway under Ray Nagin, and it had nothing to do with Nagin’s management, either. That boom came from two sources – federal recovery dollars, a staggering amount of which were wasted, and private-sector New Orleanians rolling up their sleeves.

Mitch Landrieu oversaw a Sewerage & Water Board which received billions in federal dollars under his watch and couldn’t even change over its century-old pumps. By the time he left office people were getting thousand-dollar water bills as they lived in 1,000-square foot apartments. And the potholes in the streets of New Orleans got worse, not better, during the eight years he was in office.

Anybody who didn’t drink Mitch’s kool-aid knew that he was an utterly failed mayor. So McGill proceeds to get quotes from Landrieu’s nonprofit benefactor Isaacson, his former employee Kopplin, and the leftist professor Pearson Cross who works at UL-Lafayette, as well as the UNO pollster Ed Chernevak, whose quote is the only one not kissing Landrieu’s ass.

See if you can remember the last Republican appointment to such a position who received a press writeup which was slobbering like this one. If Landrieu, given his performance as mayor, was a Republican appointed by Donald Trump he would have been called “controversial” and “rescued from obscurity.”

Obviously, McGill’s piece wasn’t written for New Orleans consumption. This is a snow job intended to make rubes from outside the Big Easy feel better about the incompetent, washed-up crook Joe Biden put in charge of his boondoggle infrastructure package. People in New Orleans, or at least those with a clue, recognize what an utter joke this is.

There’s a wider context here, of course, which is that of all the things tearing America apart the one which is most harmful and corrosive right now might be the utter cascade of lies emanating from our legacy corporate “mainstream” media. Today’s Quote of the Day is a perfect example of this – Erick Erickson notes the almost complete falsehood of the media’s narrative around the Kyle Rittenhouse case.

Everywhere you look you can see abject lies from the legacy media. The New York Times continues pushing the 1619 Project despite its multiple manifest lies. Media organizations continue hanging on to the Trump-Russia fiction even though the Durham investigation reduces it to ashes with each indictment. When it became known that the man driving a car through the crowd at a Christmas parade in Waukesha, Wisconsin yesterday, killing several, was a black criminal with a long record (it wasn’t a terrorist incident and it didn’t have anything to do with Kyle Rittenhouse; the man was fleeing from a crime scene), news reporting fell off a cliff.

And on, and on.

Naked, partisan promotion of Democrat politicians and causes at the expense of Republicans and shameless opportunism to provoke outrage and divide the country while earning clicks are all the legacy media is capable of anymore.

In that context it isn’t surprising Mitch Landrieu is being cast as a savior, regardless of how utterly stupid and farcical that may be.