Text 14844, 90 rader
Skriven 2005-09-03 09:55:32 av BOB SAKOWSKI (1:123/140)
Ärende: republicans
===================
From:  http://www.michaelberube.com

Not your father's GOP

Even the usually mild-mannered Kevin Drum is outraged:

    CLUELESS . . . .  Could the people in charge of managing the
catastrophe in New Orleans possibly be more clueless?

    George W. Bush, President of the United States, six days after repeated
warnings from experts about the scope of damage expected from Hurricane
Katrina: “I don’t think anyone anticipated the breach of the levees.ö

    Michael Chertoff, Secretary of Homeland Security, following widespread
eyewitness reports of refugees living like animals at the Convention
Center: “I have not heard a report of thousands of people in the Convention
Center who don’t have food and water.ö

    Mike Brown, Director of FEMA, referring to people who were stuck in New
Orleans largely because they were too poor to afford the means to leave: “.
. . those who are stranded, who chose not to evacuate, who chose not to
leave the city. . .ö

    Patrick Rhode, deputy director of FEMA, commenting on his agency’s
performance after four days of steadily increasing urban warfare, deeply
flawed coordination, and continuing inability to evacuate refugees:
“Probably one of the most efficient and effective responses in the
country’s history.ö

    Dennis Hastert, Speaker of the House of Representatives, providing
needed reassurance to the newly homeless: “It makes no sense to spend
billions of dollars to rebuild a city that’s seven feet under sea level. .
. .  It looks like a lot of that place could be bulldozed.ö

    This is beyond belief. What’s with these people?

Well, Kevin, I’m going to go out on a limb here and suggest that these
people are Republicans.  Not just any kind of Republicans, either—they’re
modern Republicans.  Modern Republicans are not the Republicans you and I
remember from childhood, Kevin.  Those Republicans balanced budgets.  They
built highways.  They did social infrastructure, and they did disaster
management.  They knew where other countries were, too.  They helped to
fund universities, and they didn’t mind that university professors taught
the theory of evolution.  Some of them were even pretty good on civil
rights.

Modern Republicans have left all that behind.  They don’t like government;
they want, in Lovable Furry Old Grover Norquist’s famous words, to shrink
government to the size at which it can be drowned in the bathtub. 
Consequently, when they get into government, they quickly fill its halls
with two kinds of people:  people who are charged with the task of
destroying the agencies they run, and people who have no idea whatsoever
about how their agencies work.  (Reagan set the template:  James Watt at
Interior, Clarence Thomas at the EEOC, Anne Gorsuch at EPA, among the
destroyers; Samuel Pierce at HUD, among the no-idea-whatsoevers.  FEMA gets
the latter group.) So your modern Republicans don’t do disaster management. 
In fact, there’s a lot of things they don’t do anymore.  Basically, they’re
down to two things:  one wing retools the tax code so as to redistribute
wealth to their friends and cronies in the top .001 of American society,
and the other wing works to expel gays and lesbians from the body politic. 
That’s about it.  They don’t even do war very well anymore, to be honest. 
If it doesn’t involve hoarding wealth or crusading against gays and
lesbians, their hearts aren’t really in it.  (That’s why they’ve been
pretty good at the “hoarding wealthö part of the Iraqi occupation but not
so good at the military and diplomatic parts.  And of course they like
where the Islamist clerics stand on gays and lesbians, too.)

Now, I know some folks will say that I’m not being entirely fair to modern
Republicans.  They’re right, I’m not.  Some modern Republicans, such as the
Dauphin, like to dress up in lots of specially personalized uniforms.  But
that’s not a matter of public policy.

When the levees first broke, I thought that the Bush Administration had
drawn up a list of American Cities Worth Saving.  You know, Denver,
Indianapolis, Phoenix, Omaha, Richmond, Tallahassee, Topeka, and of course
Dallas and Houston.  And cities not worth saving—the rest of ‘em.  But now
I don’t think they got even that far.  They’re not specifically motivated
to abandon New Orleans just because the city is full of poor people and
African-Americans; they simply never gave a serious thought to New Orleans
one way or the other.  Now, if the mayor of New Orleans had been conducting
gay marriages, then sure, the federal government would have intervened in a
heartbeat.  But repeated warnings of natural disasters?  Plans for
delivering food, water, and medicine to trapped survivors?  Your modern
Republican doesn’t read those.  In fact, he fires people who persist in
writing ‘em after they’ve been told to chill.

Kevin, we could use a man like Thomas Dewey again.  But he was from your
father’s GOP, and that Old School is long, long gone.
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