Katrina: "Golden opportunity": After the deluge, conservative policy entrepreneurs rejoiced .....

[marmar]

from OurFuture.org:


Katrina: "Golden opportunity"
Submitted by Rick Perlstein on August 22, 2007 - 11:37am.


As Katrina's waters began receding, leaving bloated corpses and ruined dreams in their fetid wake, not everyone mourned. Tod Linberg, editor of the right-wing flagship "intellectual" journal Policy Review rejoiced. "Bush has what Social Security and tax reform lacked: a real sense of crisis that places his political opponents in an awkward position," he wrote on September 20, 2005 in the Washington Times. "He can make demands in the name of New Orleans, including demands for substantive policy changes that he could never obtain in the absence of a crisis."

I've already said the conservative response to Katrina proved they weren't patriots. What language! An occasion for the President not to serve, but to issue "demands."

This is the authoritarian imagination at work, and from what is supposed to be the most "respectable" precincts of the conservative coalition, from a fellow at the Hoover Institute at Stanford University. This was the conservative repsonse to Katrina all over.

Michael Franc of the Heritage Foundation heralded a potential "great era of conservative governance." (Which means, of course, no governance.) Tom DeLay wrote that Katrina "has introduced a valuable forum to promote the triumph of our ideas and solutions for government over the crumbling and outdated policies of the Democrat-controlled Congresses of past decades." Hurray!

Then there was old reliable Jack Kemp.

He didn't wait for the waters to start receding. He called Katrina a golden opportunity on September 6—a "golden opportunity to 'green line' the Delta and Gulf Coast with government policies that facilitate and empower the private sector." Compared it, the sick freak, to what Franklin Roosevelt was able to do. ......(more)

The complete piece is at: http://commonsense.ourfuture.org/katrina_golden_opportunity?tx=3

[Bluebear]

1. rescued from the abyss