To my new readers: It's worth warning you that my journal isn't
usually like this, and I don't expect it to be Posts of Fury forever. If you look through the archives you'll see that it's more of a sedate science, arts and technology blog with occasional political musings.
And I suppose it's worth examining whether I should really have said it at all.
Chad Orzel and
Reid Stott, both people who I greatly respect, who are far from being administration apologists and whose blogs I regularly read and admire, come down hard against making posts like the one I just made. It's indecent, they say, to exploit the dead and the suffering by scoring partisan points when there are still bodies in the water.
Honestly, I can understand where they're coming from. I suppose that at one time I agreed with this kind of sentiment (and I'd really like it if people refrained from dogpiling on them in the comments). But I'm going to have to respectfully disagree.
What's the decent interval? It could be weeks or
months before they get all the bodies out of the water; time during which the disaster will metastasize in various ways, the country is likely to go through some major political and economic upheavals and important policies concerning energy, the economy and the treatment of displaced people will be made. If we're going to treat this in a sane manner, people are going to have to feel free to talk about politics in relation to the hurricane.
Again, we've been burned. For a while after Sept. 11, 2001 in the United States, the debate over foreign and military policy was somewhat hobbled by, as discussed before, a desire to give the administration the benefit of the doubt. The idea was that we were all on the same side; regardless of what you thought about him, Bush was our president and it wasn't right, or respectful of the Sept. 11 dead, to take potshots at him. The residual effects hung around even for many Democrats for a couple of
years, well into the 2004 election campaign, and we know what that reluctance to criticize got us: the adoption of September 11th as the Republican Party's house brand as if it were somehow a success rather than a failure, a spin machine that had no compunctions about tarring liberals as traitors regardless of how sympathetically they acted, a completely unnecessary and hopeless war in Iraq and all the rest of it.
I still think that most of us are on the same side. Bush didn't cause this hurricane; to the extent that human activity had anything to do with it, it was over decades and unknowing. It's questionable that his administration even caused the flooding of New Orleans, though decisions made on his watch might have contributed. Aid is finally starting to come in, there are people there to restore some semblance of order, and I dearly hope the situation on the ground is improving.
But what happened just before and after the storm was a massive and
total failure of government, on the local, state and federal levels, Democrats and Republicans. The way the system is currently set up, the
money that wasn't there was mostly federal. The planning failures were spread all around. And if I see the federal end of it as emblematic of the administration's indifference to carrying out the basic functions of government, I think it's fair to say it.
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