In the immediate aftermath of Hurricane Katrina in 2005, former President George W. Bush stood behind his emergency-response man, Michael Brown. “Brownie, you’re doing a heck of a job,” Bush said.

But Brown actually was doing a lousy job and resigned within days of the hurricane because of his poor management.

Four years later, the spirit of Bush lives in Barack Obama’s Environmental Protection Agency chief, Carol Browner. She offered her wholehearted endorsement to so-called climate scientists who for years, based on their own words, have been manipulating data, hiding it from the public, quashing dissent and blackballing anyone who dared not toe the environmental line.

“I’m sticking with the 2,500 scientists,” Browner said in confirming her faith in cooked numbers and “settled science.” “These people have been studying this issue for a very long time and agree this problem is real.”

In other words: Heck of a job, climate alarmists. With the help of biased journalists like Andrew Revkin and his editors at The New York Times, we’ll have this “ClimateGate” scandal out of the news in no time. You just keep spinning, manipulating and hyping like you have been.

But the spin isn’t going to work for Browner any more than it worked for Brownie. This story, as E. Thomas McClanahan of the Kansas City Star says, is not going away anytime soon.

Even the climate alarmists now realize they can’t control the grassroots peer-review system of the new media era.

“Before the Internet — which has given ordinary people a way to fight back against the received wisdom of so-called ‘wise elites’ — they might have gotten away with it,” Lorrie Goldstein wrote in the Toronto Sun. “But not now, as knowledgeable climate bloggers are advancing the story and forcing the co-opted mainstream media to cover a scandal most would rather ignore.”

[Cross-posted to Accuracy In Media. Hat tip to Don Surber]