flipping the rock: conservatism in action
Sat Sep 10, 2005 at 09:46:15 AM PDT
First of all, I think we can all agree that the Federal response to the disaster on the Gulf was:
Conservatism in Action
Conservative as a term has been used to imply a lot of characteristics that the GOP wants to drape themselves with, with the most powerful one being: "we will be strong and upright and protect you."
They weren't strong, they were slow.
They didn't protect us, they dawdled.
They weren't upright, they were downright incompetent
and when things go wrong for conservatives, like a cheap airport T-shirt :
all we ever get is PR and excuses.
This week we learned that when they say...."we will protect you"...they've got a conservative definition of that too...
It is important that we pay attention to the words conservatives use right now...the coded appeals. When the chips are down for conservatives, they do what they've always done, they blame African Americans for America's problems.
It could be Rush Limbaugh calling Mayor Nagin....Naygir. Think that will cost him a single advertising dollar?
It could be this conservative screed from Mark Williams:
"I will tell you the only role that race plays in this is that the American black population has been the prototype for an entire race of people being turned into a group of dependants of the government. And these people you saw at the convention center, the people who were trapped there, trapped -- I`m using that word very loosely -- are screaming, "We want help, we want help" for four or five days. Yet they didn`t bother even trying to help themselves. Unfortunately, in this country, the Democrat party, the same party that fought a civil war to keep slaves, filibustered 100 years to prevent the implementation of civil rights, has now completed the reenslavement of blacks by turning them into passive, totally dependent economically and for the simple common sense to walk out of the way of a hurricane... "
(You know, at least he speaks to what's on the conservative mind these days. These folks are so....1830's.)
Moving up the ladder of public accountability. It could be one of the GOP's own elected officials:
"We finally cleaned up public housing in New Orleans. We couldn't do it, but God did."
Rep. Richard Baker, (R) U.S. Congressman from Baton Rouge
That comment would get Representative Baker kicked out of a political party that actually cared....but we all know that won't happen. He's a Republican.
Moving further up the ranks, where GOP spin control starts to take over...we've got the First Lady herself using code words to play the race game. This is her response to Kanye West:
"I think all of those remarks were disgusting, to be perfectly frank because, of course, President Bush cares about everyone in our country."
"Shudder to think 'they' think we don't care...how dare 'they'..."
Of course depriving folks of food and water for five days on national television is just the conservative way to say...we love you.
For another truly caring individual, let's look at how Bush's own spin doctor Karen Hughes approaches Katrina:
The images of crime being committed in the face of an awful natural disaster is hard for anyone to understand, people around the world and Americans. It sickens me as an American. How could criminals prey on vulnerable elderly citizens and children during a time of such horror?
[What] I will challenge in any stories I see is any idea that we didn't want to help people. We certainly wanted to help everyone. It's offensive to me to suggest that somehow, as I've seen some headlines and some reports do, that people, that Americans, weren't helped because they are poor or because of their race. That is anti-American. That is not what our country is about.
Ooo. She's good. Racism...uh...I mean conservatism...is spewing out her eyeballs. But she's good. She got "crime" in there twice. She got "anti-American" in there. And she got the "caring theme" in there somehow, despite, uh, our government's...lack of action.
A hurricane and flood destroyed an American city, our government fundamentally failed our citizens, and what Karen Hughes wants to talk about is being sickened by "crime" and and offended by by "anti-Americanism." She's such a caring individual. Right.
I'm sure caring is what we all hear when Tom DeLay compares sleeping on a cot in the Astrodome to the fun of summer camp. We hear the "care" in her voice when former First Lady Barbara Bush opines...things are "working out quite well" for "the underprivileged" in the wake of Katrina.
You may call these "slips" unfortunate. I call it what it is. Racism. The kind of racist attitude that would lead you to do West Coast photo ops while a majority African-American city drowned.
Now, some will say they've apologized for that...for Willie Horton, for "welfare queens"...for Jessie Helms' ads against Harvey Gant...or George Bush's going to Bob Jones...
And, yes, they did apologize, once.:
"By the 70s and into the 80s and 90s, the Democratic Party solidified its gains in the African American community, and we Republicans did not effectively reach out.
Some Republicans gave up on winning the African American vote, looking the other way or trying to benefit politically from racial polarization. I am here today as the Republican Chairman to tell you we were wrong."
Ken Mehlman, RNC chair at a meeting of the NAACP, July 2005
But they didn't mean it. George Bush has never once met with the NAACP. He still hasn't. Mr. Bush, with all due respect, that might be a good idea right now.
And Mr. Ken Mehlman...well...here's what he's got to say today:
''It's unfortunate that it took an extreme tragedy for Chairman Dean to join our efforts to close the health, wealth, and education gap in America,'' Mehlman said.
"Nevertheless, as all Americans work together to help the Gulf Coast recover, I hope Chairman Dean will match his rhetoric with his support for reforms that replace bureaucracy and entitlement with hope and opportunity."
More code words. More conservative bullshit.
Entitlement? Excuse me?
I'm not alone in saying that everyone in this country was entitled to a response from our federal government that was much better than what we saw last week.
It shouldn't take five days to get help to people in desperate need. It shouldn't be that people are in need, and dying, and our President is doing photo ops down the block.
That happened, friends, and that's conservatism in action, too.
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