Katrina, New Orleans, & the GOP: Deep Thoughts

Hurricane Katrina gave Americans a rare chance to see first hand the kind of care and attention Baby Bush and the GOP normally reserve for Iraqis.

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Bush celebrates black approval rating

President Bush has done what no other Republican president has managed: he has reduced his job approval rating among blacks to LESS than the margin of error in the poll.

The decades long GOP Southern Strategy after LBJ signed the Civil Rights Act of 1964 ending Jim Crow relied on a certain amount of subtlty to avoid alienating law and order whites in the North who weren't necessarily racist and blacks who would agree with GOP ideology if they didn't see themselves as the scapegoat.

The Bush administration has consistently lacked this finesse. While their words are sometimes concilliatory, their is no mistaking their actions.

We are not at war with Islam--we are just killing Muslims.

We do not favor the rich--we just give them massive tax breaks and war profits.

We don't hate poor black folks--we just leave them to drown in their own sewage and be eaten by alligators, and when they try to leave, we let white sheriffs block the exits.

KEY EXCERPTS:

A Polling Free-Fall Among Blacks
By Dan Froomkin
Special to washingtonpost.com
Thursday, October 13, 2005; 3:09 PM

In what may turn out to be one of the biggest free-falls in the history of presidential polling, President Bush's job-approval rating among African Americans has dropped to 2 percent, according to a new NBC/Wall Street Journal poll.

The drop among blacks drove Bush's overall job approval ratings to an all-time low of 39 percent in this poll. By comparison, 45 percent of whites and 36 percent of Hispanics approve of the job Bush is doing.

the rest of the Washington Post article

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Compassionate Conservatism III

Compassionate Conservatism II

what the GOP leadership fears

The woman in the wheelchair is old enough to have been around in Jim Crow times.

Now she and the little girl seem to be holding hands without a second thought.

In the wake of the hurricane, most black and white Americans saw themselves as on the same side, despite the GOP and their PR flaks attempts to create a racial divide and portray the survivors as savage looters and snipers.

I have often wonder if Martin Luther King was killed not for his civil rights work for blacks, or his opposition to Vietnam, but because the last cause he was involved in, that garbage workers strike, was showing that working class blacks and whites had more to gain as allies than enemies.

When divide and conquer doesn't work, the folks in the big house start to get worried.

We should do everything we can to keep this going.

Also posted at Democraticunderground.com
http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_mesg&forum=104&topic_id=4728131&mesg_id=4728131

Core GOP belief

GOP strategist Grover Norquist has often spoken of "starving the beast" slashing taxes to force the slashing of government so that it is too weak to effectively regulate big business. His most infamous formulation of this is the quote in the motivational poster below, as is its natural consequence.

How long until the "culture of life" doesn't apply to you?

"Starve the Beast" in New Orleans

I posted this on Yahoo's Ann Coulter discussion board, so conservatives could see it.

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For those of you unfamiliar with the phrase, "starve the beast," this explains it.

From Daily Kos:

Tragedy has a way of revealing character. The constant drumbeat of death from the war in Iraq, and now the cascading nightmare that is the Gulf Coast flood has peeled away the veneer and we can see the GOP leadership and the larger conservative movement for what it is: a sham. They have nothing. They offer nothing. They come to destroy, not to build. They have no vision for a greater public good because, for them, the very notion of a public good is anathema.

Make no mistake: as we watch our fellow citizens drown, starve, and die in the street in New Orleans, its not incompetence or lack of planning that is killing them. It is willful neglect. It is the direct result of reducing the government "down to the size where we can drown it in the bathtub." This is what "starving the beast" looks like.

For some 30 years the Republican party has packaged humanity's darkest and most craven weaknesses and pawned them off as its greatest virtues. Well, the reckoning is here and the conservatives are found wanting. When the chips are down we are a nation that cares for our citizens and we expect our government to be strong enough, capable enough, and compassionate enough to do the same.

.......

Rest in peace, Grand Old Party. America can no longer afford the drag that your self-delusions and cheap justifications put on our spirit. For those who are willing to turn back from pandering to the lowest common denominator and who choose to join us lifting up the better angels of our nature, we offer the hand of friendship. For the the rest: may the God whose name you have scandalized and used as cover for your lack of humanity have mercy on your degenerate souls.

http://www.dailykos.com/story/2005/9/2/20401/46134

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The American people (and everybody else for that matter) aren't saints, which is why systems like communism don't work.

But neither are we the greedy, prejudiced, cruel, ignorant trolls the right is trying to convince us to be--and if you think that's extreme just listen to the excrement coming out of Rush Limbaugh's mouth about the hurricane survivors.

We have an obligation to our fellow citizens and it is not the same as saying we should make the rich live in cardboard boxes to say that they need to give back in taxes their fair share. At the very time we are struggling to respond to this hurricane, the Bush people are pushing to make repeal of the estate tax permanent--a tax that still let you keep most of the estate.

We have been a better country, and we can be again.