dems, this is your spine: call me sometime

I’m sick and tired of seeing high-level Democrats – senators and representatives galore – not lashing out vocally against the BushCo failure in NOLA. Sure, you hear carefully-scripted words calling for “an investigation,” but not one of them is framing the issue like this:

If you voted for George W. Bush in 2004, are you happy with what you got? Thanks to a haphazard reallocation of federal funds and priorities, the United States was hit with one of the worst disasters in its history. FEMA and the Department of Homeland Security simply sad and watched as the worst happened. National Guard troops and their equipment were overseas, not available to help the Gulf states ravaged by Hurricane Katrina. And yet President Bush and his trusted cohorts say that things are working.

If you want a truly effective and strong government – one that is truly capable of defending our own soil – vote Democrat in 2006.

Yes, this is a bit rant-ish, and needs some work. But the Democrats have to say something that is direct and not so wishy-washy. The gloves have to come off, and while there’s a good chance of falling on one’s face by speaking truth to power, there’s also a higher likelihood of coming out on top. The less risk taken, the less chance of reward – in this case, getting rid of these no-talent ass-clowns that make up BushCo.

I was speaking with a Republican recently who said that most people “wouldn’t be willing to pay more taxes to get better funding for domestic emergencies.” And that’s partly true. I think that a lot of money gathered by the IRS is poorly spent on middle-managers (witness the jumble of a bureaucracy that is the Department of Homeland Security) and cockamamie defense (e.g. SDI) and theologically-driven “education” programs (e.g. “Intelligent Design”). Even with the current federal tax base, there is adequate money to properly fund FEMA and its mission to help prevent and recover from major national disasters.

But the current administration has, in a sense, robbed from the poor to subsidize the rich. People who earn six-figure salaries have been given numerous tax cuts and loopholes by the Bush administration, thus removing many needed dollars from the federal budget. Programs that help the poor have been slashed, and the people who run these beleaguered programs have seen their numbers dwindle while their cohorts in the defense sector have seen their numbers swell (to what effect we don’t wholly know, but we still haven’t captured Bin Laden, have we?). And both the lower and middle classes have seen their standards of living decrease over the past four-plus years, with stagflation beginning to rule the roost.

(And yes, it is the beginning of stagflation. While there are more jobs out there, they are primarily low-paying jobs that do not improve the overall situation of the job holders. As the cost of living increases, and with overall per capita income for the lower and middle classes going down, the economy as a whole can’t grow. Add the aftershock of Katrina’s hobbling the Port of New Orleans, and it doesn’t look much better.)

Let’s put it another way: the U.S. position in the world’s eye has slipped down additional rungs due to the gross negligence of BushCo. The BBC was calling out the administration for leaving thousands of poor people to starve and die. A blogger from Switzerland spoke of how the entire EU is losing its view of the U.S. as a model state (“first Iraq, now New Orleans”).

That’s two strikes, George – and I’d hate to see what happens with a third.