I don't think Sully likes Bush

www.AndrewSullivan.com - Daily Dish: "QUOTE OF THE DAY II: ''The good news is - and it's hard for some to see it now - that out of this chaos is going to come a fantastic Gulf Coast, like it was before. Out of the rubbles of Trent Lott's house -- he's lost his entire house - there's going to be a fantastic house. And I'm looking forward to sitting on the porch.' (Laughter).' - president George W. Bush, today. Just think of that quote for a minute; and the laughter that followed. The poor and the black are dying, dead, drowned and desperate in New Orleans and elsewhere. But the president manages to talk about the future 'fantastic' porch of a rich, powerful white man who only recently resigned his position because he regretted the failure of Strom Thurmond to hold back the tide of racial desegregation."

Thinking more about UB's comment in the previous thread about me being unahppy no matter what Bush does. I think there are two major issues at work. One is more trivial and more about style. The other is about substance. They are related and the style betrays facts about the substance. Bush's style sucks. As Sully notes, laughing about the house of a powerful rich white man while the poor and black and old die is just bad taste. I have watched this president stumble through the week and there is a part of me that wonders where Rove is? These seem like gimmes to me. End vacation early, tour the damage--look presidential. But he can't do that.

If UB is mad because I harp too much on the style of this inarticulate President, then I plead guilty. I hate the way he speaks. I hate that the most powerful man in the world barely knows English (Disassemble: that means to not tell the truth).

But my bigger complaint is the substance betrayed by the joke about Lott's house. As I noted before, Katrina ripped the cover off our pretense. Our poverty laid bare for the rest of the world to see. That is not all Bush's fault, by any means. Southern poverty has deep roots and complex problems. That revelation should be shaming to all Americans--Americans who are blogging on computers or reading this blog. Our poverty here at home is shameful.

And that is why I harp on the political. Government was obviously the only entity that could manage and organize something this big. But Grover Norquist's vaunted goal to make government small enough to "drown in a bathtub" seems more than a sick joke now. It is reality.

We need to reclaim this. I have a hope that out of the rubble of this storm will rise an American belief in the importance and value of all Americans. A return to the idea that while Government is hardly the answer to everything--indeed there are many areas where government is ill-equipped to act--it can do some very important things to better the lives of Americans.