[Rhodes22-list] Your Tax Dollars At Work

[Slim]

Brad,

OK, sure, but do you really think Babs had all that in her head when she
said that?  C'mon!

Slim

On 9/19/05 7:52 PM, "brad haslett" <flybrad at yahoo.com> wrote:

> Slim,
> 
> You got this one wrong, quite the contrary, BB got it
> right.  Here is another perspective.
> 
> Brad
> 
> ----------------
> 
> 
> September 16, 2005
> 
> Space, food, medicine, protection: it's better here in
> Barbara's hall of plenty
> Gerard Baker
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> BARBARA BUSH. Don’t you just love her? Last week she
> put her elegant heel right into what her husband used
> to call deep doo-doo when she told a television
> interviewer that evacuees from Hurricane Katrina who
> had been housed in the Houston Astrodome were really
> very happy with their lot.
> 
> “What I’m hearing is that many of them want to stay in
> Texas,” the former First Lady said. “The hospitality
> has been so overwhelming. And so many of the people in
> the arena here, you know, were underprivileged anyway,
> so this is working very well for them.”
> 
> Not since Louis XVI’s missus puzzled about the dietary
> choices of indigent Parisians has there been such an
> appalling display of aristocratic ignorance. How dare
> she? How could she? Even the White House winced.
> 
> But in the disgust that greeted her remarks in
> Highgate and the Upper West Side no one stopped to
> consider the possibility that Mrs Bush was, in fact,
> dead right. 
> 
> Anyone who has visited the most deprived parts of
> America’s cities, rather than merely empathised with
> them from afar, would have no difficulty whatsoever
> with the proposition that the inhabitants would prefer
> an air-conditioned sports stadium with all the food
> they can eat, the country’s best medical attention and
> the benign security of National Guard protection to
> the hunger, sickness and lawlessness in which many of
> them live. 
> 
> Large parts of Detroit, Philadelphia, Chicago or Los
> Angeles already look, on their best days, as though
> they have been hit by natural disasters. I’m not at
> all surprised to hear that the fortunate who made it
> to Houston are eager to start new lives there, rather
> than return to the crime-infested housing projects of
> New Orleans. 
> 
> But Mrs Bush touched on a larger truth, almost wholly
> obscured in the rush to judgment. Most of the
> attention has focused on how the Government failed in
> responding to the disaster. I have done it myself.
> Grand conclusions have been drawn about the (flawed)
> nature of American society. I’ve done a bit of that
> too. But little has been said about what the response
> of ordinary Americans — not mayors or governors or
> presidents — tells us about the strengths of that same
> American society.
> 
> Another lucky group of New Orleans evacuees has been
> housed not far from where I live in Washington at the
> DC Armoury, the local headquarters of the National
> Guard. This week, along with the truckloads of food,
> water and clothes, came something that will, in the
> longer term, be of even greater assistance, a group of
> eager employers looking for workers.
> 
> Forty-two local businesses participated in a job fair
> for the new homeless at the Armoury on Tuesday; more
> wanted to take part but couldn’t because there was
> limited space. Twenty of the 150 or so evacuees were
> hired on the spot. An official at the District of
> Columbia government involved in organising the event
> said that more were expected to be offered jobs in the
> next few days. The exercise was such a success that
> employers are demanding another one. If there’s anyone
> left still to hire it will take place in the next
> couple of weeks. 
> 
> The story is being replicated across the country. The
> victims of Katrina are getting new opportunities. Some
> of it comes from an immense outpouring of compassion
> by Americans in the form of hundreds of millions of
> dollars in charitable contributions and unquantifiable
> help in housing families and schooling children. Some
> of it comes from the unsentimental compassion of the
> free market: the unerring capacity of the capitalist
> system to match those who have something with those
> who need it, whether it be labour, capital, goods or
> services. 
> 
> Both tell us far more about the way this country
> works, the strengths of its values and people, than
> the bureaucratic bungling in Baton Rouge and
> Washington. 
> 
> Of course you will almost certainly not have read or
> seen much about this, especially outside the US. The
> world has indicted America once again on charges of
> ineptitude and racism and has moved on to more
> important matters such as Britney Spears’s baby. For a
> variety of reasons this good news about the response
> of ordinary Americans is of little interest to the
> media. First, no self-respecting reporter wants to
> waste his time with insights into the better angels of
> human nature. No one ever won a Pulitzer or a Bafta
> recounting banal tales of man’s humanity to man.
> 
> Secondly, it really doesn’t fit too well into the
> stereotype that entrances most of the world these
> days. Anything that doesn’t show Americans as stupid,
> selfish, warmongering, religious bigots, half of them
> living in pampered luxury in garish purpose-built
> Italianate mansions, the other half downtrodden in the
> ghetto by Halliburton stock-owning fat-cats, isn’t
> going to make it to the front pages or the Ten O’Clock
> News. 
> 
> But the main reason I think these recovery efforts by
> millions of people attract insufficient attention is
> that most people have become conditioned to thinking
> solely in terms of government’s responsibility. Of
> course, the bulk of the recovery effort must be paid
> from public funds as President Bush announced
> yesterday but most Europeans and — despite decades of
> a so-called conservative revolution — a large number
> of Americans, can’t think beyond the government.
> 
> Something bad happens: it’s government’s fault for not
> preventing it. It’s government’s responsibility for
> cleaning up the mess. And if the mess gets bigger,
> that’s government’s fault too.
> 
> The irony is that New Orleans is one of those cities
> where government-dependency had reached such levels
> that a kind of economic and social anomie had set in.
> For many of its victims the escape depicted by Barbara
> Bush is just what they needed.
> 
> 
> gerard.baker at thetimes.co.uk
> 
> 
> 
> 
> --- Slim <salm at mn.rr.com> wrote:
> 
>> I thinks Barbara Bush's remark was the biggest
>> Let-them-eat-cake comment
>> I've heard for a long time.  But then, let's
>> consider the source.  All they
>> did when she was 1st lady was try to keep the
>> microphones away from her.
>> Every time she spoke, there was damage control.
>> 
>> Slim
>> 
>> On 9/19/05 7:15 PM, "R22RumRunner at aol.com"
>> <R22RumRunner at aol.com> wrote:
>> 
>>> Saroj,
>>> Ah, the old treat em like mushrooms routine. Keep
>> em in the dark and feed  em
>>> horse manure.
>>> 
>>> Rummy
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> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
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