August 25, 2007


IMPEACH BUSH


IMPEACH CHENEY


RIGHT-WINGERS REJOICE IN TRAGEDY

In the perverse world of right-wing ideology what is bad for most of us is a good thing. Mass layoffs at a company, for instance, can cause the stock price of that company to rise. In this article Rick Perlstein looks at the joy right-wingers experienced after Hurricane Katrina decimated New Orleans. What an opportunity for "free market" policies to be put into place! The article is at www.tompaine.com:

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. It's worse than that. 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 response 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introduced a valuable forum to promote the triumph of our ideas and solutions for government over the crumbling and outdated policies of the Democrat-controlled Congresses of past decades."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!