Marble Composition

Lay It On Thick

This article from today's Washington Post got me thinking back a few days ago when I read about a strategy for dealing with the political fallout from the painfully slow federal response to hurricane Katrina, from Time magazine:

By late last week, Administration aides were describing a three-part comeback plan. The first: Spend freely, and worry about the tab and the consequences later. "Nothing can salve the wounds like money," said an official who helped develop the strategy. "You'll see a much more aggressively engaged President, traveling to the Gulf Coast a lot and sending a lot of people down there."

The second tactic could be summed up as, Don't look back. The White House has sent delegates to meetings in Washington of outside Republican groups who have plans to blame the Democrats and state and local officials. In the meantime, it has no plans to push for a full-scale inquiry like the 9/11 commission, which Bush bitterly opposed until the pressure from Congress and surviving families made resistance futile. Congressional Democrats have said they are unwilling to settle for anything less than an outside panel, but White House officials said they do not intend to give in, and will portray Democrats as politicking if they do not accept a bipartisan panel proposed by Republican congressional leaders. Ken Mehlman, the party's chairman and Bush's campaign manager last year, told TIME that viewers at home will think it's "kind of ghoulish, the extent to which you've got political leaders saying not 'Let's help the people in need' but making snide comments about vacations."

The third move: Develop a new set of goals to announce after Katrina fades. Advisers are proceeding with plans to gin up base-conservative voters for next year's congressional midterm elections with a platform that probably will be focused around tax reform.

So let's review; Spend freely, don't look back, blame Democrats, avoid any accounting for what went wrong, and push issues the party faithful will vote for in the midterm elections in '06.

Now, estimates put the price tag on rebuilding New Orleans and the Gulf Coast at $200 billion, and Congress has already appropriated some $61 billion towards that effort. Just how will we as a nation help pay for this? From the Post article referenced above:

To reach $62 billion in savings, Cato Institute analysts Chris Edwards and Stephen Slivinski have proposed cutting NASA in half, slashing energy research and subsidies just as Congress is gearing up to increase them in the face of soaring gasoline prices, cutting the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers' budget by $4.6 billion after its levees failed to protect New Orleans, and eliminating $4.2 billion in homeland security grants while lawmakers are debating the nation's lack of preparedness.

Maybe I'm missing something here, but the Cato proposal is to slash the budget of the Corps of Engineers, the people responsible for rebuilding the decrepid levees, because the levees failed in the first place? So how do they get rebuilt? At least we know where the savings come from.

Then today, I run across another piece from the Post from Dan Froomkin, and he passes along this little gem (Dan also goes into the stagecraft for Bush's speech for tonight):

"Republicans said Karl Rove, the White House deputy chief of staff and Mr. Bush's chief political adviser, was in charge of the reconstruction effort."

Nice how it all comes into view. The man who constructs every political move made by the president is now in charge of doling out all the cash. Karl Rove knows as much about running reconstruction programs as the former head of FEMA Michael Brown knew about mitigating disasters. Or, judging horse shows for that matter. However, give credit where it is due: Karl sure knows how to raise poltical cash. Take for granted an absolute void of congressional oversight, and the president has just handed him the biggest political slush fund ever known to mankind.

I remember watching Book TV on CSPAN-2 a while back, and Mollly Ivans was discussing James Moore's book, Bush's Brain. Knowing Texas politics so well, she described how Rove wasn't really the "brain" of Bush; they were more peas in a pod than anything else. From all I've read, that makes a lot of sense. Back in the early days, Bush was known as a political bully, a fixer, and a useful hack. He did serve as a handy front man during his father's failed presidential run in '88. His closest partner is arguably the most ruthless political hatchet man in American history. A man unbound by rules, and unencumbered by any sense of fairness or human decency.

So there you have it America, welcome to the Second Act of "Compassionate Conservatism".

posted by FuzzFinger @ 9/15/2005 07:52:00 PM