Of all the attempts by conservatives to regain some post-Katrina balance, the most pernicious has to be the growing effort to use FEMA's failure to delegitimize the government's role in disaster-relief. Man, that's chutzpah. The car broke because Bush slashed its tires and now his allies are trying to convince us that the real problem lies with the whole "car" concept.
You should all use planes.
Planes fueled by tax cuts and personal responsibility.
It's a larger-scale, and significantly more cynical, deployment of the classic starve-the-beast strategy. If government has no tax revenues, it'll do a bad job. If it does a bad job, people won't like it. If people don't like government, they'll vote Republican. Replace "no tax revenues" with "incompetent leaders appointed through political patronage" and you've got this slimy little bastard.
Follow the ooze and you'll find the argument in its natural habitat -- Tony Snow's head. Snow, of course, has built a career dressing viciously dishonest statements in a fine Italian suit of exasperated sanity. Here he lauds the private sector's remarkable mobilization against Katrina and blasts FEMA's fatally flawed response, ending in a call for the complete privatization of disaster relief. In better times, this can all be dismissed, but add in the fact that some corporations really were impressive -- how often, after all, do I praise Wal-Mart? -- and the point begins to carry a certain amount of force.
