I've been saying, in comments at Eschaton, that the GOP ends with this crisis. I've never developed the argument enough to post it here, but I stand by it. David Brooks feared it; John Tierney opens a new round of "blame the victim" ("But then why are urbanites so much better prepared to cope with fire than with flooding? Mostly because they learned to fight fire without any help from the Army Corps of Engineers or the Federal Emergency Management Agency." You can't make this stuff up). But the NYT lead editorial, which has excoriated Bush for two days now, gets it. No, really, really, gets it. Here is the down to the bone truth:
One thing is certain: if President Bush and his Republican Congressional leaders want to deal responsibly with a historic disaster of this scale, they must finally try the path of honestly shared national sacrifice. If they respond by passing a few emergency measures and then falling back on their plans to enact more tax cuts, America will have to confront the fact that it is stuck with leaders who neither know, nor care, how to lead.
Molly Ivins said long ago, that the GOP doesn't want to govern, it wants to rule. Katrina has done more than strip away the thin veneer of civilization overlaid on much of American life. It is stripped away the mask that the GOP is a responsible political party functioning in the traditions of American political parties and concerned with the welfare and public interests in the greater good. "Generation of Swine" is what Hunter S. Thompson called it. Well, we finally see what our greed and complacency and "Me Against the World" attitude has wrought.
If the GOP responds with more tax cuts? What other response can we expect at this point. Sen. Majority Leader Bill Frist has already announced the no. 1 item on the Senate's agenda is estate tax repeal. Are we to politely consider that a mistake, an oversight, a clerical error? Like Lou Reed sang, this is no time for learned speech, and no time for being polite. Frist is not behaving erratically, unpredictably, or like he's suddenly changed his nature. This is SOP for the GOP, and it's long past time for calling on them in a gentlemanly manner to consider changing their political philosophy.
In the Times article I linked below, someone said we are all responsible for New Orleans, and they were right. We are also all responsible for the ascendancy of George W. Bush and the Generation of Swine he exemplifies and, in the truest sense, represents. We can either rail at that, or we can shoulder the responsibility, and move on. Railing about who did what is pointless: that's recrimination. Shouldering a measure of the burden, and forcing others to shoulder their measure in turn, is accountability.
The GOP is dead, killed by its own excesses, buried by its own hand. We all had a share in making it powerful; we all have a stake in bringing it down. It should not walk away from this unscathed and unconcerned. New Orleans should be their albatross, their irrefutable object lesson in what greed and neglect lead us to. The GOP should be come the sign and symbol of what happens when you neglect the widow and the orphan, and instead build fine palaces for yourself and compete in grandeur and the glory of your possessions.
"In 1877, speaking at the Powder River Conference, Chief Sitting Bull of the Lakota nation said of the European invaders who were destroying his people and their way of life, '[T]he love of possession is a disease with them.' " (Richard York) Is that what will finally kill us: our love of possession? St. Paul said "The love of money is the root of all evil." Is that what will finally do us all in? The love of money? Because that is the only excuse for the actions of the GOP any more, of the party in power: the love of possessions, the love of money, which is a disease with them, and a disease with us. New Orleans is our sign of what that leads to.
Is this the country we want to be?
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