Team Bush: The Katrina Fridge of Federal Governments


Boyd Blundell looks at the recent court decision absolving FEMA and considers its possible use as a metaphor in the upcoming election:

That’s what this coming election is about, and it’s what Dems should pound over and over again: Government That Works.

Blundell cites this earlier post from Scout-Prime asking whether the disaster in New Orleans was the result of incompetence or design in making the case that it's BOTH (aside: in a comment at First-Draft I made the same argument, noting that Shrub himself is, no pun intended, a perfect storm/metaphor for the government he nominally heads--a mix and match of elite New England arrogance/contempt for the rest of us...and plain ol' redneck, Bubba stupidity)...

The Republicans really really believed that privatization of everything from relief services to mercenary soldiers would work better, and they were really really wrong. ..

The ongoing tragic tale of the FEMA response to Katrina carries with it a moral: this is what happens when you elect a government that hates government. In the minds of our self-hating government, the fact that private contractors are more expensive and less effective is more than offset by the fact that they are not government.

Government self-hatred inevitably leads to self-sabotage. They presently have the power to sabotage government in ways that they never dreamed of, and there are huge consequences to this. The FEMA debacle is merely exhibit A. These self-haters are incapable of reforming themselves because they don’t want to. The only solution is to get them out of government so they can get back to the natural role of hating government from the outside.

We need (and New Orleans desperately needs): Government That Works.

Indeed. I think a lot of other people are making pretty much the same case, if not using the exact expression. It applies not only to the "it would be comical if not utterly tragic" response to the storms and floods of 2005, but to the leviathan-sized disaster they managed to let loose overseas. The fact that they're becoming so unremittingly hostile to their political opposition merely underscores the sheer magnitude of their failure. And we can't let the public forget that.