Katrina: "Golden opportunity"

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 [1]. "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 [2]. 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 [3] 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introduced a valuable forum to promote the triumph of our ideas and solutions for government over the crumbling and outdated policies of the Democrat-controlled Congresses of past decades."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 [4] 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.

What did he have in mind? "[S]uspending burdensome federal relations," of course, "such as the Davis-Bacon Act and the Jones Act." Davis-Bacon requires the government to pay the prevailing local wage in construction projects. Because nothing eases a family's burden than being paid less than a living wage. The Jones Act [5] mandates medical care for seamen injured or sickened during voyages, and provides benefits for injuries and deaths if a vessel is found to be unseaworthy. Nothing more burdensome than finding yourself injured on the open seas, and being forced to be attended to by a doctor.

What's more, "onerous regulations imposed by the Federal Trade Commission, the Federal Communication Commission, and the Environmental Protection Agency could be suspended." Deploying a hurricane to unleash more of the same environmental degradation that the best evidence suggests is causing more and more hurricanes [6]: Say this for our conservative friends, they certainly are brazen. Heh, heh, heh, golden opportunity...

Continued Kemp:

Certain taxes, such as gasoline taxes, telephone taxes, and others could be suspended for the duration of the emergency... Small businesses could be relieved of payroll taxes... to further increase access to capital, the capital gains tax could eliminated.

Because nothing spurs the most massive public rebuilding project since the firebombing of Germany than starving the public coffers! (Though Kemp with his targeted nonsense proved a pussy next to Steve Forbes. He called for a ten-year "tax holiday." [7] A holiday. Whoopee!!)

Heritage eventually formalized such whackadoodle notions in a special report by Edwin Meese. [8] Another Heritage report [9]: "Katrina Victims Deserve Better Than Medicaid." National Review said it was time to revive the efforts to privatize Social Security [10]: "Their importance has increased, not diminished, because of the hurricane." The same author [11] offered a 23-page list of government programs to cut [12], including the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (those evil hurricane-enabling muppets!) and said it was time for the government to get out of the levee-building business altogether: "the possibilites are limited only by your imagination."

This was, after all, what Bobby Kenendy would have wanted. Concluded Kemp:

In the wake of this national catastrohpic, [sic] we all should be imaginging the unimaginable and recalling when during another time of uncertainty and apprehension, Robert Kennedy paraphsed George Bernard Shaw: "There are those that look at things the way they are, and asky why? I dream of things that never were, and ask why not." [sick]

It gets sicker. How did Kemp chose to blurb himself for the readers? By bragging, "Mr. Kemp is founder and chairman of Kemp Partners, which has done work on behalf of corporate defendants in abestos litigation reform."

Whose idea was it to let these people within thirty miles of the government?

[Thanks, PFAW!! [1]!]