The left sinks to new depths. The reaction of the left on the hurricane on the Gulf coast is to bash George Bush. Chad Schuldt does it twice, here and here. The first link compares Bush to Nero, which reveals an historical ignorance on Chad's part that is stunning in its proportions. I suppose before long Chad will be calling Bush the Anti-Christ, as St. John does Nero in Revelations. On the matter of whether Bush was playing guitar while he knew people were dying, see this note by Andrew Breitbart at Huffington Post (scroll down):
I tend to not go to this Kos site for source material, but that's your call. A simple look in Yahoo's news pic bin showed that the photo op happened BEFORE New Orleans began to submerge. As you can see, the photo was filed at 10:30 eastern daylight time. The levee breaks which caused "a major city being overtaken by the Gulf of Mexico" started to happen at least an hour and a half later. No one that I know of in media or government, or even this specialty site, Kos, is on record that the disaster you blame him for ignoring was actually happening at the time (or predicting it). At the time, NPR and the Huffpo included, were going along, business as usual. Things, of course, changed soon thereafter. The president cut short his vacation in Texas and headed straight to DC. For you to distort the timeline in order to bash the president puts you into the category of human you were trying to appropriate the president.
The second Schuldt claim is that because of the war in Iraq we are taking money away from other necessary spending. There are two claims here. First, one only has to check CBO numbers to show that's false. If you scroll down to the section on non-defense discretionary spending, which is where infrastructure spending such as levees would fall, you see the spending is projected to go up. This chart shows that non-defense discretionary spending has gone up at a steep rate for at least seven years, the Bush years included. Second, I don't want to take time to teach elementary public policy, but policy is generally divided into three categories: distributive, regulatory, and redistributive. The executive's role is greatest with redistributive and lowest with distributive, with regulatory policy being in the middle. Levees and roads are classic distributive policy. The level at which these decisions are decided is the congressional committee or sub-committee level. It is in distributive policy that one sees the classic "iron triangle" relationship between a government bureaucracy, an interest group, and a congressional committee. There is little doubt that a Bush appointed official had little or nothing to do with the amount of money spent on levees. That dollar figure was most certainly arrived at by a career bureaucrat (perhaps in the Dept of Transportation), an interest group (local areas with flood issues) and a sub-committee chair. If Chad wants to bash a Republican, find the chair of the relevant sub-committee and attack him. Sorry Chad, hate might be on your side, but the facts and rudimentary political science are not.
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