It’s striking to watch the emphasis and focus of Scheer’s editorials shift as the Katrina aftermath continued to unfold in the South and in Washington. His outrage and horror are clear and, of course, well-founded.
From two weeks ago, on September 6:
http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/la-oe-scheer6sep06,0,4722106.columnThe real costs of a culture of greed
Robert Scheer
September 6, 2005
(snip)
Instead of the much-celebrated American can-do machine that promises to bring freedom and prosperity to less fortunate people abroad, we have seen a callous official incompetence that puts even Third World rulers to shame. The well-reported litany of mistakes by the Bush administration in failing to prevent and respond to Katrina's destruction grew longer with each hour's grim revelation from the streets of an apocalyptic New Orleans.
Yet the problem is much deeper. For half a century, free-market purists have to great effect denigrated the essential role that modern government performs as some terrible liberal plot. Thus, the symbolism of New Orleans' flooding is tragically apt: Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal and Louisiana Gov. Huey Long's ambitious populist reforms in the 1930s eased Louisiana out of feudalism and toward modernity; the Reagan Revolution and the callousness of both Bush administrations have sent them back toward the abyss.
Now we have a president who wastes tax revenues in Iraq instead of protecting us at home. Levee improvements were deferred in recent years even after congressional approval, reportedly prompting EPA staffers to dub flooded New Orleans "Lake George."
None of this is an oversight, or simple incompetence. It is the result of a campaign by most Republicans and too many Democrats to systematically vilify the role of government in American life. Manipulative politicians have convinced lower- and middle-class whites that their own economic pains were caused by "quasi-socialist" government policies that aid only poor brown and black people — even as corporate profits and CEO salaries soared.
(snip)
From a week ago on September 13:
http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/la-oe-scheer13sep13,0,7935658.columnSeptember 13, 2005 latimes.com : Opinion
ROBERT SCHEER:
Finally fooling none of the people
(snip)
Then there is the fact that the first-responder corps has been vastly depleted by Bush's misadventure in Iraq. Visiting New Orleans on Monday, Bush argued that "it is preposterous to claim that the engagement in Iraq meant there weren't enough troops" to help with hurricane relief. Oh yeah? Tell that to the nearly 35% of Louisiana's Army and Air National Guard forces and 37% of Mississippi's National Guard troops deployed abroad, mostly in Iraq. "Had
been at home and not in Iraq, their expertise and capabilities could have been brought to bear," said Army Lt. Gen. H. Steven Blum, the National Guard Bureau's chief, referring to the critical first hours of the disaster.
Unfortunately, what the Bush White House is good at when it comes to national security is providing flash over substance, as Democratic Sen. Mary Landrieu of Louisiana found out the hard way. After riding in a helicopter with the president and seeing machinery apparently working on the breached 17th Street levee, she was shocked the next day to find the work mysteriously stopped. "Flying over this critical spot again this morning, less than 24 hours later, it became apparent that yesterday we witnessed a hastily prepared stage set for a presidential photo opportunity; and the desperately needed resources we saw were this morning reduced to a single, lonely piece of equipment," said the senator in a press release.
For far too long, this kind of shenanigan worked well for Bush, allowing him to narrowly win a second term. His administration was asleep at the switch on 9/11 even though "the system was blinking red," according to the then-CIA chief. Bush grabbed a bullhorn at ground zero and remade himself as a "war president" — and suffered no real political damage from the failure to either capture Osama bin Laden or find weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.
But, as one of this nation's greatest war presidents said, you cannot fool all of the people all of the time. With the Iraq war grinding on with no end in sight and the postmortems of the Katrina debacle showing the White House and Homeland Security Department to have been as confused and inept as FEMA itself, Bush's support in several national polls has continued a steady plunge to below 40%. A Newsweek poll found that, for the first time, less than a majority of Americans felt Bush possesses "strong leadership qualities," his signature claim to fame. Boy, have they got that right.
(snip)
And from September 20:
http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/la-oe-scheer20sep20,0,7149222.columnSeptember 20, 2005
Robert Scheer / latimes.com : Opinion
A new storm on the right
(snip)
One would have hoped that the avowedly "born again" younger Bush would have witnessed the disconnect between the teachings of the son of God, which repeatedly counsel aiding the poor and vulnerable, and his own family's "let them eat cake" approach to governance. After all, 37 million Americans — 13 million of them children — are living in poverty, 4.5 million more than when Bush was first inaugurated. This sad fact is never mentioned when the president trumpets the alleged benefits of his tax cuts for the rich.
(snip)
Bush may be getting the message that government is not the enemy. But forced by his worst political crisis to suggest that government has a major role to play in not only reconstructing the Gulf Coast but also in confronting the reality of a patently unequal playing field, the president has angered "Reagan revolution" conservatives.
For example, conservative pundit George Will, frightened that Bush's promise to significantly assist the devastated Gulf Coast might unleash a new wave of social spending, rushed last week to assert the pervasive myth that this nation has a level playing field. Staying out of poverty is simple, he argued, if you just follow "three not-at-all recondite rules: … Graduate from high school, don't have a baby until you are married, don't marry while you are a teenager."
But do Will and his ilk really believe a child raised in foster homes and juvenile hall, or an 85-year-old living on Social Security, can so simply pull themselves up by their bootstraps? Sadly enough, it may be harder to get conservative journalists or politicians into the world of a junior high school kid in an impoverished neighborhood than to get a camel through the eye of a needle.
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