"Katrina Changed Everything" (funeral)

[AnnInLa]

www.oliverwillis.com

A popular refrain of the right and the Republican party is that “9/11 changed everything”, and they’re mostly right. 9/11 did change our national posture towards terrorism and the middle east, and we’ll never be completely ignorant of international forces building up against us again. But there was also another event that changed a lot, if not everything. Hurricane Katrina.

snip

It hit Bush’s approval ratings in a way John Kerry and the Democrats were never able to, and they have not significantly recovered since. Suddenly, it became clear to many what progressive partisans like myself have been going on about for years: the rhetoric doesn’t match up with the reality, and the negligence directly lead to the deaths of hundreds of our fellow citizens. We now live in a post-9/11 AND post-Katrina America.

But the events at the King funeral today exposed an even stronger shift among a subgroup against Bush and the right. Republicans and the mainstream media tend to see black Americans in politics through the lens of Condoleeza Rice and Colin Powell. But each election has told us that among their race, Rice and Powell are dramatically out of step with the mainstream. And that was pre-Katrina. All of black America saw their fellow black Americans pleading on television for the President to simply do his job in alleviating the madness of Katrina, but beyond the news it is largely black America that has done the job of absorbing the massive migration of New Orleans’ black population to the rest of the country. I believe it is a significant story that the media has all but ignored — it’s no coincidence that the president’s approval among blacks dropped to a miniscule 2% at the height of the crisis in one poll.

But Bush has been in his bubble, one in which all the black faces he meets are smiling and spouting RNC generated talking points about what a great man he is. Today he met reality. He met the majority, the black America that never really liked him and hasn’t forgotten his negligence during the hurricane — is it a coincidence that the site of one of the worst natural disasters in American history received a piddling two mentions in the state of the union address?

For the first time, Bush met the people on the front lines of post-Katrina America. It was not a pleasant encounter for the 43rd president. Good.

www.oliverwillis.com

((Oliver Willis is an African-American. He works for MediaMatters.org, and blogs alot about Maryland politics. You really should bookmark his blog....it is always interesting.))

[KittyWampus]

1. started a thread w/ similar title. "Bush's Spying Changed Everything

Unfortunately, most DU'ers didn't grasp the concept of taking a GOP talking point and using it to their own advantage.

Moving on towards the GOP and it's relationship with blacks.

Why the Democrats don't start confronting the GOP with the term "Southern Strategy" on a daily basis is beyond me.

The blatant racism in the GOP's methods and policies is enough to disgust moderates.

[Warpy]

2. Yeah, but he didn't think they were talking about HIM

He's really that clueless, kept sealed tight into a little world where spending on the poor is increased every year and the terrorists are on the run and the war in Iraq is going as planned and the GDP continues to climb and jobs are being created every day and everything is lovely in the garden and it's always summer and even the birds are singing his praises. He has no earthly idea what a fuckup he is because no one will ever tell him. As long as his immediate surroundings are pleasant, he is not curious as to the state of the world beyond them, and that is how his handlers like it.

He smiled during those speeches because he knew they were all talking about the Democrats.