“Hurricane!”(TM) Gets the Blue Out!

Digby, citing Frank Rich’s recent article:

… I hadn’t thought about the similarities between Bush’s plight and that of Tom Cruise before and I should have. After all, Bush consciously adopted the Cruise Top Gun persona for the most audaciously over-the-top performance of his presidency. And here they both are today: absurd, clownish versions of their former selves, rejected by the masses who once worshipped them. The only difference is that Cruise was massively successful at everything he did until he fired his amazing publicist Pat Kingsley and turned into a freak a couple of years ago. Bush’s Pat Kingsley, Karl Rove, hasn’t been nearly as successful over the long haul.

Rich also provides a quote by Douglas Brinkley, the historian, about the real Katrina agenda and I really think there is no doubt that he’s correct:

Douglas Brinkley, the Tulane University historian who wrote the best-selling account of Katrina, “The Great Deluge,” is worried that even now the White House is escaping questioning about what it is up to (and not) in the Gulf. “I don’t think anybody’s getting the Bush strategy,” he said when we talked last week. “The crucial point is that the inaction is deliberate — the inaction is the action.” As he sees it, the administration, tacitly abetted by New Orleans’s opportunistic mayor, Ray Nagin, is encouraging selective inertia, whether in the rebuilding of the levees (“Only Band-Aids have been put on them”), the rebuilding of the Lower Ninth Ward or the restoration of the wetlands. The destination: a smaller city, with a large portion of its former black population permanently dispersed. “Out of the Katrina debacle, Bush is making political gains,” Mr. Brinkley says incredulously. “The last blue state in the Old South is turning into a red state.”

We all talked about the Aftrican American NOLA diaspora sort of abstractly last year but it really has come to pass. A large part of the city and environs aren’t coming back and as long as the rebuilding is so “slow” they won’t. Eventually they will put down roots elsewhere. The result is that the Democratic base of Louisiana has been disappeared. I have no doubt that is no accident.

When you read this alongside Poputonian’s review (also at Digby’s blog) of Vonnegut’s rant about pychopathic personalities (specifically the ones running the show right now), assuming the worst seems to make a lot of sense.

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