9/11 and H. Katrina:
"Bookending" Bush's legacy
Wielding Hurricane Katrina as the proverbial blunt object, Thomas Friedman attempts to deal the Bush Presidency a death blow in a September 7 New York Times column. While grudgingly acknowledging that "9/11 is one bookend of the Bush administration", Friedman posits that "Katrina may be the other."
Ignoring the obvious fact that a lot can happen in the three years left in Bush's eight year presidency, and relying on oblique references to his recently authored books, Friedman pulls disparate and unconnected observations together and, voila, Bush is history. Look ma, nothing up my sleeves.
Nothing upstairs, either.
My deconstruction of his piece, originally published on Port McClellan, follows.
When I get time, I will check out Friedman's books from the library and start feeding....
Ignoring the obvious fact that a lot can happen in the three years left in Bush's eight year presidency, and relying on oblique references to his recently authored books, Friedman pulls disparate and unconnected observations together and, voila, Bush is history. Look ma, nothing up my sleeves.
Nothing upstairs, either.
My deconstruction of his piece, originally published on Port McClellan, follows.
When I get time, I will check out Friedman's books from the library and start feeding....
posted by Jay Cline at 10:08 AM
1 Comments:
Friedman:
On the day after 9/11, I was in Jerusalem and was interviewed by Israeli TV. The reporter asked me, "Do you think the Bush administration is up to responding to this attack?" As best I can recall, I answered: "Absolutely. One thing I can assure you about these guys is that they know how to pull the trigger."
Deconstruction:
Friedman superficially acknowledges that the Bush Administration knows how to respond to bad guys, yet the undertones indicates that Friedman doesn't regard this as a very favorable trait, ie pull out Rambo when you need someone with the amoral determination to waste people, but lock him up when you don't - didn't Dolph Lundgren and Van Dam make a few really bad movies based on this premise? Friedman needs to get his reality check outside the movie theater, not inside.
Friedman:
It was just a gut reaction that George Bush and Dick Cheney were the right guys to deal with Osama. I was not alone in that feeling, and as a result, Mr. Bush got a mandate, almost a blank check, to rule from 9/11 that he never really earned at the polls. Unfortunately, he used that mandate not simply to confront the terrorists but to take a radically uncompassionate conservative agenda - on taxes, stem cells, the environment and foreign treaties - that was going nowhere before 9/11, and drive it into a post-9/11 world. In that sense, 9/11 distorted our politics and society.
Deconstruction:
Bush never earned a clear mandate to be President from the people? uhm..., 9/11 wasn't an issue in 2000 - even I can invent sim-worlds - this doesn't make any of his resulting conclusions valid. The faulty conclusion is that Bush's mandate in 2004 was limited strictly on foreign policy - funny, I don't remember the Constitution creating two concurrent presidencies. Anyone conscious in 2004 (that leaves out most Democrats - sorry, sarcasm crept in) knew Bush's conservative agenda. Yet they voted for him anyway. Just because Friedman characterizes Bush's well-known political agenda as radical and uncompassionate doesn't make it so, Joe. The only valid conclusions are Bush had the mandate to use as he saw fit. If the opposition didn't like it, there is the ol' system of checks and balances to.. er, I forgot, the Republicans got the mandate (I mean stole the electoral process with the overwhelming drumbeat of war) to exercise sovereign right in both houses of Congress, didn't they? Second valid conclusion - 9/11 distorted nothing. Just because the electorate doesn't agree with self-proclaimed media Tyrants like Friedman, it doesn't mean they are stupid or were duped.
Mr. Friedman, on the other hand, well ...
Friedman:
Well, if 9/11 is one bookend of the Bush administration, Katrina may be the other. If 9/11 put the wind at President Bush's back, Katrina's put the wind in his face. If the Bush-Cheney team seemed to be the right guys to deal with Osama, they seem exactly the wrong guys to deal with Katrina - and all the rot and misplaced priorities it's exposed here at home.
Deconstruction:
A whole pack of lies wrapped around a kernel of truth; yes, 9/11 was the opening bookend of the Bush Administration. Friedman's desire to make Katrina the closing bookend belays the fact that Bush still has a significant portion (40%) of his Presidency left. Friedman is just whistling in the wind. It is called, I believe, a strawman argument.
Friedman:
These are people so much better at inflicting pain than feeling it, so much better at taking things apart than putting them together, so much better at defending "intelligent design" as a theology than practicing it as a policy.
Deconstruction:
Cheap shot, but for the sake of the argument, ok. Everyone has known since 2000 that Bush's objective (and the conservative movement in general - you know, all those Congressmen that subverted the will of the sovereign majority and got elected in 2000, 2002, 2004) is to remake government from a welfare state to a more conservative one where personal responsibility counts for more than building a welfare constituency with lifetime subsistence bribery.
To build a new system, you have to clear out the incompatible components of the old system first.
So, still a cheap shot.
Friedman:
For instance, it's unavoidably obvious that we need a real policy of energy conservation. But President Bush can barely choke out the word "conservation." And can you imagine Mr. Cheney, who has already denounced conservation as a "personal virtue" irrelevant to national policy, now leading such a campaign or confronting oil companies for price gouging?
Deconstruction:
So what does that have to do with levees in Louisiana designed 37 years ago to withstand only category 3 hurricanes, or for that matter, the price of tea in China? Friedman is bloviating.
Friedman:
And then there are the president's standard lines: "It's not the government's money; it's your money," and, "One of the last things that we need to do to this economy is to take money out of your pocket and fuel government." Maybe Mr. Bush will now also tell us: "It's not the government's hurricane - it's your hurricane."
Deconstruction:
Not our money? uhm, We the People? to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed,? - I am not just making up these words for the sake of the argument. Of course it is our money. And it is the government's money. Six of one and half dozen of another. And then Friedman does what he does best, putting words in someone else's mouth. It isn't the government's hurricane and it isn't ours; same logic.
Friedman:
An administration whose tax policy has been dominated by the toweringly selfish Grover Norquist - who has been quoted as saying: "I don't want to abolish government. I simply want to reduce it to the size where I can drag it into the bathroom and drown it in the bathtub" - doesn't have the instincts for this moment. Mr. Norquist is the only person about whom I would say this: I hope he owns property around the New Orleans levee that was never properly finished because of a lack of tax dollars. I hope his basement got flooded. And I hope that he was busy drowning government in his bathtub when the levee broke and that he had to wait for a U.S. Army helicopter to get out of town.
Deconstruction:
Don't know who Norquist is; don't care. he ain't the President. The rest just shows Friedman at his spiteful worst.
Friedman:
The Bush team has engaged in a tax giveaway since 9/11 that has had one underlying assumption: There will never be another rainy day. Just spend money. You knew that sooner or later there would be a rainy day, but Karl Rove has assumed it wouldn't happen on Mr. Bush's watch - that someone else would have to clean it up. Well, it did happen on his watch.
Deconstruction:
Again, Friedman's words in someone else's mouth. Who says that is the underlying assumption? Again, the underlying assumption of the prevailing conservative agenda is that all the trillions of dollars spent over the past 60 years has just been poured down the drain with no investment value at all (except for the political fortunes of the Democratic Party). If the assumption is that the federal government is wastefully spending money, then it is only rational to refund it back to the stockholders. The question is whether there is a better way to lift people up out of poverty, other than entrenching a permanent class of poor. Oops, sorry. We were talking about disaster relief, not the welfare system. H. Katrina was a major disaster not because it was a big storm, but that it was bigger than 37 year old levees could handle, levees that the local population and politicians knew wouldn't do the job, but never did anything about it.
Friedman:
Besides ripping away the roofs of New Orleans, Katrina ripped away the argument that we can cut taxes, properly educate our kids, compete with India and China, succeed in Iraq, keep improving the U.S. infrastructure, and take care of a catastrophic emergency - without putting ourselves totally into the debt of Beijing.
Deconstruction:
Last things first. Yes, China has bought up a whole lot of US investments. In fact, according to a recent issue of The Economist, Chinese economic growth, which is a direct result of open market liberalization (read: less big government interference) in China, has driven the world economy in massive proportions. The answer to a lot of the economic conundrums that even has Greenspan befuddled (American economy heating up without inflation, housing market "bubble", etc) is the spectacular Chinese economic growth. Friedman makes assumptions about government policy in education, globalization, American hegemony etc. without justifying it. Oh, excuse me. He wrote some books, didn't he. I guess if we want to understand his logic, we need to fork out some dough and buy the books. Sounds like a journalistic conflict of interest to me.
Friedman:
So many of the things the Bush team has ignored or distorted under the guise of fighting Osama were exposed by Katrina: its refusal to impose a gasoline tax after 9/11, which would have begun to shift our economy much sooner to more fuel-efficient cars, helped raise money for a rainy day and eased our dependence on the world's worst regimes for energy; its refusal to develop some form of national health care to cover the 40 million uninsured; and its insistence on cutting more taxes, even when that has contributed to incomplete levees and too small an Army to deal with Katrina, Osama and Saddam at the same time.
Deconstruction:
Same argument. First, in the 1980 Presidential election, Republican cum Independent Party candidate John Anderson proposed a 50 cent gas tax for just that reason. His lack of success at the polls, even as a third party candidate, was dismal. Second, even if Bush circa 2000 had imposed (how do you impose something without Congressional support? Bush's party didn't control Congress then...) a $4 gas tax, it takes years and years for that investment to pay off, at least to the extent Friedman claims it could have. Now, if we had listened to Anderson, maybe. Maybe.
Of course, Clinton could have done the same thing.
I read a report recently that a lot of the alleged mismanagement by the Corps of Engineers in Louisiana over the past many years was more a result of Congressional interference from Louisiana Representatives than anything else. And Louisiana Gov. Blanco refused for political reasons (according to even one of her own people) to cooperate with Bush in unifying operational command of Guard and other first responder resources two days AFTER Katrina hit. Oh, and Saddam is in jail, Osama is crippled without an adequate rear echelon base to work from. The Army doesn't do hurricanes; local and state resources and National Guard and FEMA are responsible. FEMA had their resources prepositioned. In the first two days, the US Coast Guard, under FEMA direction, rescued about 3000 people. Gov. Blanco was only just getting around to call for mobilization of 40,000 National Guard. It takes 72 hours to mobilize Guard units, bubba. The Coast Guard was mobilized in the days before Katrina hit Louisiana.
Friedman:
As my Democratic entrepreneur friend Joel Hyatt once remarked, the Bush team's philosophy since 9/11 has been: "We're at war. Let's party."
Deconstruction:
Ah, Friedman has invited one of his lackeys to the Party. I guess Friedman has franchised the right to put words in other people's mouths....
Friedman:
Well, the party is over. If Mr. Bush learns the lessons of Katrina, he has a chance to replace his 9/11 mandate with something new and relevant. If that happens, Katrina will have destroyed New Orleans, but helped to restore America. If Mr. Bush goes back to his politics as usual, he'll be thwarted at every turn. Katrina will have destroyed a city and a presidency.
Deconstruction:
Yes, the party is over. With Screamin' Dean as the DNC Chair, just wait for 2006. Maybe someone in the Democratic party will finally be roused from their stupor.
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