They Just Don't Get It

Are the Bushes a family of sociopaths?

I'm not sure how seriously to pose that question, but you really have to wonder after the comments some of them have made in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, which the mayor of what used to be New Orleans has claimed could end up claiming as many as ten thousand lives -- more than three times as many as died at the World Trade Center on 9/11.

When President Bush got to the scene (a little late), what was his comment? He promised to rebuild -- the house of his fellow Republican, Senator Trent Lott. "I look forward to sitting on his porch," Bush said smugly while the home-bound elderly trapped in flood ravaged New Orleans drowned for lack of assistance from the federal government.

As if that wasn't bad enough, his mother, Barbara Bush, was even more despicable on a recent radio interview, saying of the evacuees that ''What I'm hearing, which is sort of scary, is they all want to stay in Texas. Everyone is so overwhelmed by the hospitality. And so many of the people in the arena here, you know, were underprivileged anyway, so this is working very well for them.''

Do you believe this insensitive clod? Does she really have an ounce of compassion in her overstuffed body for poor people who have lost everything they had?

Of course not, she's a member of the Bush family. Stupid question.

You know it's bad when even such conservative stalwarts as MSNBC's Joe Scarborough start criticizing the president over this debacle. "The president's suggestion that the size of this storm caught all by surprise just doesn't get it," Scarborough writes. "His administration was 48 hours late sending in the National Guard and poor Americans got raped and killed because of those mistakes."

It's nice to know that conservatives can tell the truth on occasion.

Rush Limbaugh isn't nearly as honest, but his observations are, in an odd way, illuminating. "What we've seen in New Orleans," Limbaugh said on the air, "is first and foremost the utter failure of generation after generation after generation of the entitlement mentality. Flood victims had been doubly victimized by the perception that government would somehow save them from nature's rage. They had no idea what to do because they've been told somebody else was going to fix it."

Typical of Limbaugh to blame the poor for their response to a natural disaster. The problem, however, isn't with the poor thinking that government would help them -- the problem is with a theory of government that the Republicans have had since Reagan, that government is the problem, not the solution. Do you think if Katrina had hit the Gulf Coast ten years ago that the response of the Clinton Administration would have been as callous and inept as that of the Bush Administration? Of course not. And you know why? Because liberals believe that government has an obligation to help the poor and the needy in times of distress. Conservatives don't. They think that it's a Darwinian, dog-eat-dog world, and if the weak don't survive, that's just too damn bad.

What we've been seeing in New Orleans over the past two weeks has been the conservative philosophy in action -- and it has not been a pretty sight.

Tom Moran