"I got mine--get yours" Republicanism

I'm sure we'll all breathe easier knowing this:

WASHINGTON - Beset with criticism over the federal response to Hurricane Katrina, President Bush said Tuesday he will oversee an investigation into what went wrong and why — in part to be sure that the country would withstand more storms or even a weapons of mass destruction attack.

[ . . . ] But Bush said now is not the time to point fingers and he did not respond to calls for a commission to investigate the response.

"One of the things people want us to do here is play the blame game," he said. "We got to solve problems. There will be ample time to figure out what went right and what went wrong."

As an intellectual exercise, it'll be interesting to watch BushCo "defend" themselves on the twin disasters of planning and relief for Hurricane Katrina because--while they care truly, madly, deeply about Bush's falling poll numbers--the truth is most of them don't really think they have anything to defend.

They understand, of course, that this is not the kind of thing that you can say on TV without taking a political hit, so they're willing to go through the charade of an investigation.

But in truth, most of them don't think anything went wrong last week, because they don't think government has any obligation to offer relief to its citizens who can't already afford it themselves. They're the "drown government in a bathtub" guys--or drown it in the basin that used to be New Orleans, as the case may be.


Here are some high points from Tom Watson's take on it:

For this crew, government is bad in its essence, whilst power remains good; that's a strange, warped view to govern under, but it's what we now have at the helm of the United States. This government did not act because under its philosophy government should not act. Government does best when it stays out of the way, and lets folks just be folks.

[ . . . ] No, this government sat back on its heels, was horribly incapable of acting, because action was anathema to its soul. Heck, better to roll back the estate tax - or do away with bankruptcy protection for the middle class and working poor. Poverty has risen for five consecutive years for the first time in U.S. history: that's a good thing, the markets are at work, things will even out.

[ . . . ] No, true hard-core conservatives do not believe in a social compact, a common effort, knitting all classes together. They believe in winner take all

[ . . . ] Keep the agenda alive, the conservative agenda. Get government off our backs. No handouts. Land of opportunity. Spreading freedom throughout the world. Keep the South solid red state territory; preserve the divisions regardless to preserve the vote. This is Rove's mandate now.

As for how a group of faux leaders who care more about vacations and designer shoes than about saving their fellow citizens from disease, despair, and drowning by the thousands can continue to enjoy any popular support at all from among the ranks of the would-be drownees themselves, that's just a riddle America will leave for the ages, like the Sphynx or the disappearance of the Anasazi.