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Those of us who dropped our National Review subscriptions for The American Conservative would agree that the Iraq debacle leads, but would lurch at this:

“I suspect that George Bush has actually pushed conservatism about as far as it can go.”

I expect better than a college-student view of “conservatism” as “whatever Bush does” from Kevin Drum. For the hundredth time, very little about Bush is “conservative,” including the launching of a pointless war for “democracy” in Iraq. It’s to the great detriment of conservatism that Bush has come to be associated with it. (For a summation of my feelings on this, see the TAC cover story on “conservatives who hate Bush.”) Though with respect to Schiavo and Katrina, I think this is Drum complaining, not the voters…

Interesting how everyone seems to be accepting this election result, especially (relieved?) conservo-commentators embarrassed by (as Rush said) “carrying water” for idiots like Bush. My personal hope is that the GOP will learn the lesson that subcontracting our foreign policy to a small group of neocons, ignoring border security and otherwise forgetting Nixon’s silent majority is a loser’s game.

I agre that those played a part… with the caveat that “Katrina as Federal faillure” was almost exclusively a media invention – it worked, which is quite disturbing to those who favor facts as opposed to the “reality based” community.

I also feel that most people felt that the Schiavo case was very disturbing… but that the Congressional response was stupid. SOMETHING needed to be done, yes (even many non-“extremem elements of the Christian right” feelt that way), but what WAS done was essentially useless grandstanding. Stupid.

Re-reading my last comment, I want to clarify that the “SOMETHING” people wanted done regarding Schiavo was not necessarily to save her life, but I heard LOTS of people express pretty large discomfort with the method she was killed – we don’t execute the worst of society’s offenders by starvation/dehydration. If she really was completely brain dead (and it seems most likely from all the reading I did), put her “to sleep” like a dog (or a convicted murderer in several states), even take her out and shoot her, that would have been better.

The fear was, “What if there was a mistake?” I mean, we’ve done our best to make sure there’s not, and we’re not going to chang our minds that she’s going to die, but JUST IN CASE, let’s at least make the death humane, you know?

That was what I heard the most… and Congress did NOTHING about that. Morons.

In both cases the law was followed. The uproar was to go against the law with Schiavo and to impose martial law against the will of the local authorities in Katrina. In neither case did anyone later propose to change the laws.

The Katrina disaster in New Orleans was caused solely by the city and state governments which happen to be leftist in the extreme.
They refused federal help until it was too late, even refused entry to the hardest hit areas to organisations like the Red Cross because that would “dissuade people from evacuating”.
FEMA was ready to move faster than ever, but was held up by red tape at state level (they’re not allowed to operate in any state without prior permission from that state) and city level (similar).
Same with the federal military, they were sitting on the border waiting to move in when allowed to, while the national guard (under state control) was sitting in their barracks waiting for orders from the governor.

The president could do little. If he’d bypassed the state and local authorities the left would have cried foul about the “invasion of Louisiana by the Feds” and the “destruction of state rights by the Bushite government”.
He however works through existing channels (as he should) and gets blamed for the laxadaisical attitude of the locals who are slow to act.

“Katrina exposed serious problems in our response capability at all levels of government and to the extent the federal government didn’t fully do its job right, I take responsibility,” George W. Bush
9-13-2005

Here’s the Timeline for Katrina:
http://thinkprogress.org/katrina-timeline

Go find a timeline without an agenda. That one REAKS of it.

I particularly liked the “ROVE-LED CAMPAIGN TO BLAME LOCAL OFFICIALS BEGINS” bullet – um, could it be because, I don’t know, the LOCAL OFFICALS ACTUALLY WERE TO BLAME for quite a bit of it? Like, say, leaving their own buses to ruin when THEIR OWN DISASTER PLANS (which they didn’t follow) called for their use? Just one of MANY examples.

The whole “Katrina as federal failure” meme was almost exclusively invented by the media. Compare the federal response to Katrina to ANY OTHER HURRICANE in the last decade. It was certainly at least as good a response as Andrew got in Florida.

In short, the HONEST story was how good a job the federal government did, on the whole, and compared to previous fderal governments efforts. The HONEST story was what a cock-up the local government was, on th whole, compared to all the other areas hit by Katrina (why don’t we hear about how terrible things were in Mississipi, for instance? Because they didn’t screw up like LA – the FDERAL response was the same). Excuse us while we try to stick to the facts; you can go live in your own little world if you like, but don’t complain when we don’t come along.