Bush supporters' aftermath thread

You know, I was kidding at first but we really should consider finding a way to keep Bush on vacation for the welfare of the country. Not to mention save us any farther embarrassment.

mysteryman wrote:

I hate to break up this lovefest,but Fox news is reporting that chief justice Rehnquist has just died.
That gives Bush 2 USSC apointments.

Perhaps Justice O'Connor will decide to postpone her retirement?

But you can be sure political operators on Capitol Hill were active on this well before the Justice's sad end.

There was no gloat and no disrespect.

Something for the Left and the Right here, and I think the last paragraph says it all:

This time, what worked before failed. At times like this, Americans need to help each other.

Copyright 2005 Creators Syndicate

McTag, you have many commendable qualities. Being a positive influence isn't one of them.

Sorry BBB, but only a devoted Leftie could think that being negative is the same thing as being positive.

Not so. Speaking personally, it is my mission here to present a point of view which is widespread overseas, and which seems to be gaining more ground in the States, that this administration has been a very bad servant of the country it was elected to serve.

The Wrap: A worm's eye view

Monday September 5, 2005

Anyone who imagined that George Bush feels a responsibility to the poor was deluding themselves, writes Andrew Brown

The backlash against George Bush seems to be spreading right across America, even among the people who normally believe all his nonsense. This is of course satisfying and welcome. While there are still corpses floating through the streets of New Orleans he has joked that one of his buddies' houses will be rebuilt, better than ever. He deserves a shameful end.

There are particular, identifiable decisions that he made which made the catastrophe worse. He appointed incompetent cronies to important jobs. He starved of money the agencies that might have maintained the levees. He did nothing to prepare for the disaster, which was long foreseen as a possibility, and clearly likely in the four or five days before the hurricane actually landed.

But we need to be balanced here, and to apply to Bush the same standards as we apply to the looters in the ruins of New Orleans. Like them, he has a personal responsibility for his actions - but we must also suppose that, like them, he might have been a harmless, even a useful member of society if it were better organised.

Obviously he was not responsible for the hurricane. Maybe even the subsequent catastrophe wasn't his fault. The really frightening possibility is that Bush isn't responsible for the failure of the relief efforts, and that no modern president could have done much better.

In this context, it's useful to think about moral hazard. This is usually applied to reasoning about the poor: for example, if generous social security means no penalty for idleness, and no reward for hard work, then we can expect more idleness and unemployment than otherwise. But there is moral hazard to riches too. George Bush has never in his entire life been punished for failure, and neither has anyone he has appointed. Disloyalty or insubordination are the only crimes he recognises. Should we blame him or the system?

Quite probably, the federal emergency management agency would have done a better job had Gore or Kerry been president. It's hard to see that it could have done worse. But the point about such speculation is that it's irrelevant. Given the choice of better men, the system threw up Bush, twice. The second time he even won the election. It will seem to historians quite absurd that such an untried child of privilege should have even run for president, let alone succeeded. Say what you like about British democracy, but we would not even elect Mark Thatcher to a seat in parliament, and his business career is at least as distinguished as Bush's.

But democracies can survive bad leaders. That is their best justification: they don't guarantee immediate success, but they do provide a more efficient, and less bloody means of punishing failure than any alternative. The test will be to see whether America will realise that the aftermath of the hurricane was a failure that mattered, and that demands democratic action. My guess is that it will carry on much as before.

When seven - not seven thousand - black illegal immigrants were killed in a house fire in Paris last month, the famously rightwing interior minister was down at the scene the next morning, taking his chances with an angry crowd, promising that measures would be taken. Why did Nicolas Sarkozy do this? Because he wants to be president, and he knows that he will be helped to this, in France, by showing that the state cares when catastrophe strikes even the poorest and meanest citizen. That's just not true in the USA, which is why we must blame the system for Bush, as well as indulging our natural disgust at his character flaws.

A fearful hatred of the black poor is far too deeply embedded in American politics for anything to change. A country that really believed the poor had human rights, or even the rights of ordinary citizens, would not have allowed its president to react to Katrina as Bush did. But neither would it tolerate the American prison system, or the American health insurance system. All these things are not merely tolerated, but made worse.

Time after time, it has been proved that the way to win elections in America is to promise to grind the faces of the poor still harder. No politician can fight this fact. Look at the things that Bill Clinton did to be elected, the retarded black man he had executed to show that he was tough. That was his moral hazard.

I suspect that Bush's core vote won't be affected at all by the scenes in New Orleans. On the contrary, this frightful failure of government will be taken by the right as proof that federal government can't do anything except wage war. But the trouble with believing that your government is a worthless excrescence is that sooner or later, you will find that it is true - and by then, it will be too late.

* Andrew Brown maintains a weblog, the Helmintholog.

Sorry BBB, but only a devoted Leftie could think that being negative is the same thing as being positive.