Bush’s Katrina Speech
While bouncing Eidan on my shoulder last night, I endured Bush’s monotonic, robotic Hurricane Katrina speech. Bush is fairly good at rhetoric geared towards aggression, but a total failure at feeling people’s pain. Where is Bill Clinton when you need him? (his remarks at the Oklahoma City memorial service were so moving they gave him a 12-point boost in the polls). But what matters most is substance. On that count, Bush said one thing that angered me, and another that scared me. Josh Marshall picked up on the same two things, and has already blogged about them:
Let’s see. What was the problem with Michael Brown exactly? Let’s see. No expertise or experience for the job. Got the gig because he was pals with Bush’s political fixer. Also a political loyalist.
So to learn the lesson and get back on track, to run the recovery, President Bush picks Karl Rove [Bush's long-time chief political strategist, whose sole area of expertise is running political campaigns].
That’s great.
Do we really all need the paint by numbers version of this picture [see Paul Krugman's Not the New Deal op-ed].
Then there’s the president’s great line from the speech: “It is now clear that a challenge on this scale requires greater federal authority and a broader role for the armed forces.”
No, it’s not. Actually, every actual fact that’s surfaced in the last two weeks points to just the opposite conclusion. There was no lack of federal authority to handle the situation. There was faulty organization, poor coordination and incompetence.
Show me the instance where the federal government was prevented from doing anything that needed to be done because it lacked the requisite authority.
This is like what we were talking about a few days ago. This is how repressive governments operate — mixing inefficiency with authoritarian tendencies.
You don’t repair disorganized or incompetent government by granting it more power. You fix it by making it more organized and more competent. If conservatism can’t grasp that point, what is it good for?
