Cause And Effect

Cause: This stupid argument that has been boiling in this country over the last 25 years about states rights versus the role of the federal government, foisted on us largely by the Repugs, particularly Ronald Reagan and William Rehnquist, which to me originates back to the Civil War and is a byproduct of the festering dislike of the North by the South and has been cleverly exploited by the Repug pro-business and fundamentalist conservative coalition.

Effect: What we’ve been watching on our TV screens in the Gulf Coast area for the last two weeks.

Anyone who thinks the “cause” argument I mentioned above is theoretical only hasn’t been paying attention.

As any person of common sense knows, there are things states should be allowed to do (I’m not big on state-by-state abortion laws, but I’ll acknowledge that right, as well as anything related to gay marriage), but there are things that ONLY THE FEDS CAN DO, and it is beyond tragic and disgusting that there aren’t more people on either side of the aisle who seem to understand that.

Actually, I thought this Letter To The Editor in the Inquirer today summed it up well:

President Bush and others who share his political philosophy have built careers convincing people that a strong federal government compromises life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness. Why, then, would he be quick to direct the antagonist to come to the rescue of those in need?

The slow response could have been predicted as surely as the storm was.

Rebecca C. Greenhow
West Chester

Louisiana can’t coordinate enough forces from National Guard units in other states to lend a hand because some of their own Guard forces have been deployed to Iraq. Louisiana couldn’t coordinate food drops (which should have happened) or transportation of refugees to other states for shelter. Only the Feds can do that.

To get a better context, I think it would help to review FEMA’s history. Jimmy Carter creates the agency and got it to run well. Reagan comes in and lets his buddies run it, but fortunately nothing happens (I can’t recall anything, nothing like Katrina anyway). I don’t remember what H.W. does, but I don’t think he did much either. Clinton comes in and brings in James Lee Witt to rebuild the agency and get it to run well and do what it’s supposed to do. Dubya gets in and brings in Joe Allbaugh (who subsequently leaves after the “Mission Accomplished” farce to make money referring reconstruction jobs in Iraq to Halliburton) and then Mike Brown. I’m sure you see the same pattern that I do.

Update: The beat goes on in the Gulf Coast reconstruction (by the way, you can see that 86 percent of those polled thought the jobs should have been awarded through competitive bids).

Finally, to get an idea of how desperate some of Bush’s supporters are regarding their hero’s failure regarding Katrina, I heard this argument from an American Enterprise Institute right-wing know-it-all named Jim Glassman the other night on “Real Time With Bill Maher” (the update is forthcoming). He said, “Of course the states screwed up. We had two hurricanes hit Florida last year, and everything ran well and we had nothing like this. It seems that Florida can get its act together, but Louisiana and Mississippi can’t.”

(I swear, all you can do is laugh sometimes…in a related vein, Glenn McCoy had a sick and truly propagandistic cartoon in today’s Inquirer to support the garbage from Glassman that I mentioned above.)

Gee, maybe the fact that last year was an election year and the incumbent’s brother was the governor of Florida (as well as the fact that the state decided the 2000 election…well, sort of – I won’t go there) had something to do with it, or am I just being cynical again?

One more thing: If you continue to be as PO’ed about this as I am, then please go to the prior post and sign Jim Dean’s petition to establish an INDEPENDENT bipartisan commission to investigate this travesty.