Piling On

Some surprising sources are coming out with commentary that is not putting a happy spin on things for BushCo or the extreme conservative movement. First, from the centrist-conservative/business-oriented Financial Times (behind a firewall, but thankfully provided by subscriber and blogger Jerome A Paris at the European Tribune blog):

There are at least three reasons why the hurricane may mark a turning point in the US debate over the role of government. First, the deep tax cuts enacted in 2001 - which President George W.?Bush now wants extended permanently - left no room for government initiatives that might have prevented the catastrophe and increased capacity to respond. (...) [The article notes all the funding cuts by Bush for required work on the New Orleans levees] Second, despite huge increases in spending to fight the war in Iraq, the hurricane revealed how thinly the US military has been stretched. [The article notes how the local National Guard was in Iraq ] (...) Most striking, however, has been how the storm has ruthlessly exposed the poverty that still afflicts a substantial minority of Americans, and has grown worse since Mr Bush pushed through tax cuts that overwhelmingly benefited the well-to-do. The US Census Bureau reported this week that another 1.1m Americans slipped below the poverty line last year. After falling for most of a decade, since 2000 the number of Americans in poverty has grown from 11.3 per cent to 12.7 per cent of the population - a higher percentage than in the 1970s despite 30 years of generally robust economic growth. [...] With the New Deal in the 1930s, helping those who could not help themselves became a mission that spawned a vast expansion of government's role. After a generation of determined effort the conservative movement has succeeded in squelching that mission. In the aftermath of Katrina, its success appears to have come at high cost.

Jerome then goes on to note a piece by commentator Christopher Caldwell, also in the FT (and found in the same Jerome post as above):

Five years after discovering they had suicide terrorism within their borders, Americans are now being introduced to the notion of having their own "refugees", too. Tens of thousands of them are being bussed to neighbouring states from the city's convention and sports centres, where they have been sleeping for days. The state of Texas has announced that it will accept 23,000 refugees in Houston's Astrodome. An unsettling - and internationally embarrassing - aspect of this mass movement is the discovery that almost all the unfortunates stranded in New Orleans are black. Most Americans consider defacto segregation a fading reality. They may be right. But the TV footage challenges that view, to put it mildly. Under the weight of homeless migrants from New Orleans, the previously sleepy state capital of Baton Rouge hasbecome the largest city in Louisiana, like some Middle Eastern border city that people pour into in search of asylum. Ouch, that must hurt. Remember, this is a conservative writing! He then goes on to describe, in detail, the criticism thrown at the Bush administration for its inept handling of the disaster relief. He has not a single word to contest these words, only saying that these have been provided by the New York Times and "others". Not a stinging rebuttal at all, and actually a strong airing of these stinging words. The political consequences for Mr Bush are more likely to resemble those visited on the Turkish government in 1999, accused of a slow response when a massive earthquake outside Istanbul killed 17,000 people, many of them living in rickety apartments. Thisis the way such disasters usually work. Rightly or wrongly, the government not only gets blamed for its incompetence in dealing with the disaster. It also becomes a symbol of years of bad decisions. Or, which is worse, a symbol of bad luck. The last sentence is the only one that can be construed as a defense of Bush ("it's only bad luck"), but actually, it means that he considers that the Bush administration is toast ("rightly or wrongly" - he doesn't even take sides, just allowing for some doubt about it). The comparison with the Turkish earthquake is actually pretty devastating, because the government there lost all credibility with the public for two things: its inept handling of the aftermath all the stories that came out about how the construction codes had not been respected and how the politicians in power had profited from the construction work through corruption and largesse and let the country with vulnerable buildings (in areas known to be earthquake-prone). But this is the meme: "the conservative movement has succeeded in destroying the government and this is the result" AND THE BUSINESS WORLD IS FINALLY NOTICING AND IS NOT HAPPY ABOUT IT.

And then there's this from conservative NYTimes columnist David Brooks while on PBS's NewsHour (via War and Piece):

This is -- first of all it is a national humiliation to see bodies floating in a river for five days in a major American city. But second, you have to remember, this was really a de-legitimization of institutions. Our institutions completely failed us and it is not as if it is the first in the past three years -- this follows Abu Ghraib, the failure of planning in Iraq, the intelligence failures, the corporate scandals, the media scandals. We have had over the past four or five years a whole series of scandals that soured the public mood. You've seen a rise in feeling the country is headed in the wrong direction. And I think this is the biggest one and the bursting one, and I must say personally it is the one that really says hey, it feels like the 70s now where you really have a loss of faith in institutions. Let's get out of this mess. And I really think this is so important as a cultural moment, like the blackouts of 1977, just people are sick of it. [...] But to reiterate the point I made earlier, which is this is the anti-9/11, just in terms of public confidence, when 9/11 happened Giuliani was right there and just as a public presence, forceful -- no public presence like that now. So you have had a surge of strength, people felt good about the country even though we had been hit on 9/11. Now we've been hit again in a different way; people feel lousy; people feel ashamed and part of that is because of the public presentation. In part that is because of the failure of Bush to understand immediately the shame people felt. Sitting up there on the airplane and looking out the window was terrible. And the three days of doing nothing, really, on Bush was terrible.