Re: Not His Fault
- From: "Olompali4" <Olompali4@xxxxxxx>
- Date: 8 Sep 2005 04:31:58 -0700
Washing Away the Conservative Movement
By William Rivers Pitt
Tuesday 06 September 2005
The responsibility of ministers for the public safety is
absolute, and requires no mandate. It is in fact the prime
object for which governments come into existence.
-- Winston Churchill
Somewhere, at this moment, a neoconservative is
seething.
It isn't fair, he rages within. We had it wired. The
House is ours, the Senate is ours, the Supreme Court is
ours, the Justice Department is ours, the television news
media is bought and paid for. We could act with impunity,
say whatever we needed to say to get what we want, do
whatever wanted, and no one could touch us. We could
refashion the nation as we saw fit, whether people wanted to
come along with us or not, because we know better.
We followed Leo Strauss's edicts to the letter, growls
the seething neoconservative. Strauss, our neoconservative
godfather, told us that this nation is best run by an elite
that does not have to bother with the will or desires of the
populace. Strauss told us we didn't even have to bother with
the truth while pursuing our agenda. We are the elite, and
we know best.
Somewhere, at this moment, a neoconservative is seething
because his entire belief structure regarding government has
been laid waste by a storm of singular ferocity. Hurricane
Katrina has destroyed lives, ravaged a city, damaged our
all-important petroleum infrastructure, and left every
American with scenes of chaos and horror seared forever into
their minds. Simultaneously, Hurricane Katrina has
annihilated the fundamental underpinnings of conservative
governmental philosophy.
What we are seeing in New Orleans is the end result of
what can be best described as extended Reaganomics. Small
government, budget cuts across the board, tax cuts meant to
financially strangle the ability of federal agencies to
function, the diversion of billions of what is left in the
budget into military spending: This has been the aim and
desire of the conservative movement for decades now, and
they have been largely successful in their efforts.
Combine this with a wildly expensive and unnecessary
war, rampant cronyism that replaces professionals with
unqualified hacks at nearly every level of government, and
the basic neoconservative/Straussian premise that the truth
is not important and that the so-called elite know best, and
you have this catastrophe laid out on a platter. The
conservative and neoconservative plan for the way this
country should be run has been blasted to matchsticks, their
choice of priorities exposed as lacking, to say the very
least.
The Katrina disaster in a nutshell: A storm that had
been listed for years as #3 on America's list of "Worst
Possible Things That Could Happen" arrives in New Orleans to
find levees unprepared because massive budget cuts stripped
away any ability to repair and augment them. The storm finds
FEMA, the national agency tasked to deal with the aftermath
of natural disasters, run by Bush friend Michael Brown, a
guy who got fired from his last job representing the rights
of Arabian horse owners. The storm finds a goodly chunk of
the Louisiana National Guard sitting in a desert 7,000 miles
away with their high-water Humvees parked beside them. The
storm finds that our institutional decades-old unwillingness
to address poverty issues left tens of thousands of people
unable to get out of the way of the ram.
Grover Norquist, one of the ideological leaders of our
current administration, once said he wanted to shrink the
federal government until it was small enough to be drowned
in a bathtub. Well, those who believe in his view of things
have worked very hard to accomplish this, and we see now
what happens when you do that. In this case, the government
did not drown. An American city did.
Early estimates of the costs to repair the damage to New
Orleans are rolling above $100 billion. The invasion and
occupation of Iraq has cost many times more than that. The
gigantic tax cuts of a few years ago further denuded the
federal budget. Conservative and neoconservative dogma
required this, and has left us singularly vulnerable. They
have always wanted a weakened federal government, and now we
have one, and a lot of people are dead because of it. The
cost of this storm, plus the cost of the tax cuts, plus the
cost of the Iraq war, plus the long-term damage to our
economy caused by high gasoline prices, is going to kick the
guts out of our government for a very long time to come.
In so many ultimately dangerous ways, their exposure is
complete. For the last four years, we have been inundated
with the claim that only Bush and the neocons can protect us
from terrorism. The justification and shield for every
action taken, no matter how absurd, has been that it is for
our own good and defense. That's all dust now. "This is the
Law and Order and Terror government," writes MSNBC newsman
Keith Olbermann in his blog. "It promised protection - or at
least amelioration - against all threats: conventional,
radiological, or biological. It has just proved that it
cannot save its citizens from a biological weapon called
standing water."
Above and beyond the fact that the levees have broken
all around the governmental philosophies of the
conservative/neoconservative crew is the question of whether
this could have been avoided with a little bit of personal
responsibility. There is a lot of finger-pointing going on
at the highest levels right now; at one point over the
weekend, Bush defenders absurdly attempted to blame the
Mayor of New Orleans for what happened. One boggles when
trying to determine how the mayor of one city bears the
responsibility for the damage and lack of rescue response
that took place in Mississippi, Alabama and outside the
realm of his parishes. This was a nicely Straussian twist on
the truth, straight out of the playbook.
Could it have been avoided? Let's ask the National
Weather Service, which sent out this alert on Sunday, August
28th: "A hurricane warning is in effect for the north
central gulf coast from Morgan City, Louisiana, eastward to
the Alabama/Florida border, including the city of New
Orleans and Lake Pontchartrain. Maximum sustained winds are
near 160 mph with higher gusts. Katrina is a large
hurricane. Coastal storm surge flooding of 18 to 22 feet
above normal tide levels, locally as high as 28 feet, along
with large and dangerous battering waves, can be expected
near and to the east of where the center makes landfall.
Some levees in the greater New Orleans area could be
overtopped."
"Some levees in the greater New Orleans area could be
overtopped." That was Sunday. Monday passed, and then
Tuesday, and then Wednesday, and then Thursday, and then
Friday, and then the weekend came, before any action of any
significance whatsoever was taken to protect the lives of
the citizens of that city.
Also on Sunday the 28th, Governor Blanco of Louisiana
dispatched a letter to Bush formally requesting help for the
horror she saw rolling towards her state over the southern
horizon. "Under the provisions of Section 401 of the Robert
T. Stafford Disaster Relief and Emergency Assistance Act, 42
USC. 5121-5206 (Stafford Act), and implemented by 44 CFR
206.36, I request that you declare an expedited major
disaster for the state of Louisiana as Hurricane Katrina, a
Category V hurricane approaches our coast south of New
Orleans; beginning on August 28, 2005 and continuing," read
the letter. She went on in great detail over four full pages
to list a series of requests that, had they been granted,
would have spared thousands of people from death.
She was flatly ignored. Forget the fact that a hurricane
hitting New Orleans has been on the danger list for decades.
The Bush folks got the word on Sunday, not once but twice,
and instead of swinging into action, they literally ate
cake.
Have they learned anything from this? Hardly. The most
important bit on this week's conservative agenda, beyond
stuffing Mr. Roberts into the Chief Justice chair, is to
repeal the estate tax. Yes, that's correct, before we do
anything else, we have to make sure the rich of this nation
get an even larger slice of the pie. This caused DNC
Chairman Howard Dean to launch a singularly pointed salvo
over the weekend.
"Countless thousands of our fellow Americans throughout
the Gulf Coast region continue to suffer in the aftermath of
hurricane Katrina," said Dean. "While some have begun the
painful task of rebuilding their lives and coping with the
unfathomable loss, so many still await help. And the cost of
this disaster in human and material terms remains unknown.
It's simply irresponsible for Senator Frist and Ken Mehlman
to even think about spending our tax dollars on breaks for
millionaires at a time when our top priority must be to
ensure we have the resources needed to address the long and
short term costs associated with rescue, recovery, and
rebuilding in the wake of hurricane Katrina. Not to mention
the vital lesson we learned this week about the deadly cost
of diverting funds at the expense of the safety of the
American people. These costs, continued Dean, "also come at
a time when our nation faces a massive deficit, and mounting
costs in the ongoing war in Iraq."
It isn't irresponsible, Chairman. It's standard
operating procedure. They've been doing it like this for so
long that they've forgotten how to do it any other way. They
are such true believers that they cannot fathom doing it any
other way. Likely, they will get away with it, and the loss
of estate tax revenues will further damage our nation's
ability to care for its own.
The house of cards has fallen in. A generation of
conservative thinking, combined with five years of
neoconservative thrashing, has finally come to an
unavoidable head. The agencies tasked to protect us - FEMA
and the Department of Homeland Security to name two - have
been proven to be utterly useless. The heads of these
agencies - Chertoff and Brown - are the perfect avatars of
Bush's way of doing business, insofar as they have no
business being in the positions they are in. The
conservative movement has failed spherically, from all sides
and in all directions.
So here's a thought: Let's repudiate these fools. When
the basic software for the operating system of a computer is
proven to be riddled with bugs and bad code, it is time to
rewrite the whole thing. We have to do that here, with our
government and institutions, and we have to do it now. Throw
conservative dogma into the dustbin of history where it
belongs.
Remember that a massive, highly industrialized and
infrastructured, diverse nation requires an effective
central government, funded properly and staffed by
professionals and patriots, in order to keep the wheels on
the road. Remember the words of that great Republican,
Oliver Wendell Holmes, who said, "Taxes are the price we pay
to live in a civilized society." What we are seeing in New
Orleans is not civilized society, but anarchy. The reasons
for this are as clear as the nose on your face.
They have failed us. Many people are dead because of it.
It's time to change the software. Enough of this Boo Radley
leadership.
.
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