In listening to the first ten minutes or so of Bush’s speech, I was ready to joke with my republican co-workers tomorrow that if I didn’t know better, I’d think that I was listening to a “big government” spending spree being outlined. I guess that was all just set-up to the Heritage Foundation’s agenda.

So, the central piece of the federal response to the largest natural disaster in our nation’s history is tax cuts. At least he’s consistent.

The governor of Louisiana has “taken responsibility” for the failures in the state’s response to Katrina. That particular meaningless gesture must have played well with the right demographics or the right part of the media for Bush if it convinced Babineaux Blanco to follow suit. Sanctimonious windbag Rush Limbaugh used to love to say say that words have meanings and those meanings can have consequences. Clearly, this was just one more thing he was wrong about.

This is just horrifying. I have some real qualms with some of the wording, characterizations, and choice of language in the article, but that all takes a back seat to the facts of the situation. I have no real doubt that their intentions were good. I just can’t even imagine having to face that situation. My mom, from time to time, tries to convince me that I should go back to school and get an RN. I’ve often wished I’d done that right after high school. The flexibility and financial compensation that mom has in her work really is exactly the kind of thing I’d like to have in my life, particularly the chance to make a lot more money simply by working more hours. It’s also a field where you’re helping people, which is a definite component of my current job search. My response is always that, at my age, I think it’s too late to start a career where I would have other people’s lives in my hands. I don’t think I’d ever feel competent to take on that responsibility. This article put that into stark reflief.

My simple knee jerk reaction to the manner in which Bush has “taken responsibility” for failures in the way the Federal government handled Katrina is simple sarcasm about how apparently all of that “personal responsibility” crap from the Right is meaningless blather, that simply saying you “take responsibility” for something without suffering any consequences is cheap and pointless.

I think there really is a larger issue here beyond the partisan political implications. We are, in a very real sense, a post-political nation. It’s nothing new to note that politics in this country has a very real “root for the home team” aspect to it that allows people to condemn the other side for things they excuse on their own side. That particular type of intellectual prostitution isn’t even specific to us or our times. In a post by Bee Lavender, I was recently reminded of a very apropos quote by George Orwell on the subject:

There is no crime, absolutely none, that cannot be condoned when ‘our’ side commits it. Even if one does not deny that the crime has happened, even if one knows that it is exactly the same crime as one has condemned in some other case, even if one admits in an intellectual sense that it is unjustified — still one cannot feel that it is wrong. Loyalty is involved, and so pity ceases to function

The thing that our place and time has added to that is sort of inability to distinguish politics from partisanship, or perhaps it’s just we don’t even know what politics is anymore. We can’t distinguish policy from personality. Being liberal is more about the books you read, the things you buy, and the type of manners you want to see in a public debate than it is about wanting single payer healthcare or a clean environment or whatever. Oh sure, we want those things, too, but they’re just accessories to our liberal lifestyle. And it’s no better on the right. Being mean and insensitive just to prove you’re no damn effete elitist, bitching about “cultural elites” oppressing you while everything you do, culturally, is part of the entrenched, dominant cultural attitudes, and blindly supporting any jingoistic claptrap that the right spews forth is more important than traditionally responsible fiscal policy, small government, or public decency. If it were otherwise, the Republicans would have had no choice but to reject their own president en masse last year.

I don’t believe that there is any single thing George Bush could do or screw up that would hurt him with the 35-40% of the country that is in the “mainstream” of the right wing. To turn your back on Bush would be the same thing as turning your back on the lifestyle and values you claim to believe in. So long as he is consistent in his pronouncements, you must stand by him. To do otherwise would make you a hypocrite. And, boy, there’s nothing worse than being a hypocrite in modern society. I firmly believe that my side, for the most part, is no better. We’re a nation of political illiterates. We supported Clinton while he pushed NAFTA, cut the social safety net, and spent 8 years bombing Iraq. I know there are a few of you to the left of me reading this who may be feeling smug about your ideological purity, ready to blurt out that you didn’t support Clinton while he was doing those things. Well, I’ve got a post coming for you, too. You’re certainly not the role model that we liberals would want to pattern ourselves after.

I really can’t even believe this. This is worse than martial law.

Time Magazine is putting out a story on the fudged (to put it mildly) resume of FEMA chief Michael Brown. You’d think that if this sort of thing could keep you from getting the football coach’s job at Notre Dame, it would really get in the way of being made head of FEMA. Apparently, they do a bit more inquisition into the backgrounds of their staff in South Bend than they do in DC.

A quick blurb from the Huffington Post gives a little more detail. If this sinks him, it’s the right result, but man is it the wrong reason and the wrong process.

William Rivers Pitt is one of my favorite blogger/columnist guys. In his latest, he asks What have the dead taught the living in the last two weeks? For starters, ” We have learned that priorities matter. We have learned that the conservative small-government model is a recipe for catastrophe. We have learned that government is sure to absolutely fail its citizens when it is run by people who hate government”

Any brief, unexpressed hope that I had that the catastrophe in New Orleans would change the direction of things in this country has been crushed by the conservatives in my office this week. Most of these guys are not the hardcore, radical types. They’re solidly Republican in the “welfare types are lazy” and “what’s wrong with saying the pledge at school or having a prayer at football games” kind of way. Not terribly reflective fellows, but also not bad guys. Mostly, they aren’t armed with racist assumptions and rhetoric about liberals being traitors. The more moderate third to maybe half of them even expressed things like “I’d have voted Edwards-Kerry, but not Kerry-Edwards” after the election. They all also have at least a little bit of that “the little guy’s gettin’ screwed” populism that the GOP has somehow convinced them can be fixed by the “free market”.

These guys are mostly dismissing reports about misconduct by police and national guard in New Orleans as being conspiracy theory crap. They question whether or not their tax dollars should be going to help house and feed all of these people with no skills, who are likely to just become permanent wards of the state in their view. Moreover, some of them even question whether there’s a duty to help at all beyond evacuating people before and after the storm. They quickly dismiss any criticism of Bush’s handling of this as Democratic spin. Facts about changes in the budgets or organizational structure of the Corps of Engineers, FEMA, or the National Guard are dismissed as “lies, damn lies, and statistics”. I would imagine that the “hard right” in this country is even worse.

If what I’m seeing really represents the moderately conservative to conservative half or more of our country, we’re really screwed. In so many things, these guys have proven to be a good barometer of the more conservative half of mainstream America over the last couple of years. I hope that maybe they aren’t this time.

Also, on a somewhat related note, there’s this column in the post.

I don’t know how long this file will be available because I haven’t viewed things on this site before, but this is excellent. It starts off a little slow, but is damn good by the end.

http://media.putfile.com/OlbermannSwings

I resisted posting anything about this until I had a few more sources, but it’s been confirmed to me by enough people who don’t even know each other for it to be reliable in my mind. The only caveat I can offer is that so far, all of the information is second hand or third hand. The aid situation in Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama is nearly as screwed up as the pre- and post-Katrina evacuation and rescue plans. The big thing seems to be bureacratic turf wars. Some agencies are trying to sabotage the efforts of rival agencies, rather than trying to work together for the common good. In that sense, they seem to be mirroring the battle between state and federal officials on the ground. Some agencies are turning away donations of non-perishable food and water, saying they want cash instead. Other agencies, have turned down offers to house refugees in unused vacation homes, rental homes, or other unused properties. It’s a big stupid mess and it’s the poor victims of this tragedy who really suffer the consequences of all the stupidity.