Bush’s folly

Gene Lyons

Posted on Wednesday, September 7, 2005

URL: http://www.nwanews.com/story.php?paper=adg&storyid=127691

At times like these, many feel an instinctive wish to rise above politics. With bodies still emerging from the wreckage left by Hurricane Katrina, partisan bickering ought to be the last thing on anybody’s mind. But acknowledging our common humanity shouldn’t blind us to the reality that much of the devastation wrought by the storm is as much a consequence of human folly as nature’s wrath. It does no honor to the dead to pretend otherwise. For more than a generation, pretty much all we’ve heard from Republican (and some Democratic) politicians in Louisiana, Alabama, Mississippi and elsewhere is how the federal government was the source of all domestic ills. Grover Norquist, the Washington political operative widely credited with devising the GOP’s winning strategy, famously stated that he didn’t want to abolish the national government, but shrink it "down to the size where you could drown it in a bathtub."