Gustav Is Coming...

[Joanne98]

Remember the Children’s Crusade known as the Coalition Provisional Authority? Sure you do. They were the good-looking, whip-smart, thoroughly inept young guys ‘n’ gals for whom reconstituting the newly-invaded Iraq was a total freakin’ goof, a lark delivering both a paycheck and some desert cred they could wave in the face of Cardwell and Persiflage and all their other chums at the dinner parties back in Georgetown. And, of course, a noble exercise in service, okay? Something between an Outward Bound session to placate Dad so he’d (finally) buy you the S-Type, and a summer camp production of Kismet.

From Thomas E. Ricks’ definitive Fiasco:

No clear strategy, very little detailed planning, poor communications, high personnel turnover, lots of young and inexperienced political appointees, no well-established business processes,” concluded retired Army Col. Ralph Hallenbeck, who worked at the CPA as a civilian contractor dealing with the Iraqi communications infrastructure. Personnel was an especially nettlesome issue. Hallenbeck said that in addition to being young and inexperienced, most of the young CPA people he met during his work as a contractor were ideologically minded Republicans whose only professional experience was working on election campaigns back in the United States.


Is it coming back to you? It’s been five years, so take your time. Or try this: “Heckuva job, Brownie.”

Ring a bell? The Arabian horse guy in charge of making sure people stepped over the dead bodies as they left the Superdome?

This–the military referring to C.P.A. as meaning “Can’t Produce Anything;” New Orleans citizens drowning in their attics while FEMA chiefs try to get each other on the phone–is what you get when you get Republicans in government.

When a party that only believes in politics but doesn’t believe in governing ends up with power, you get catastrophe, scandal, and corruption. You get career government people trying to do their jobs, thwarted by Young Republicans for Self-Dealing; you get serious professionals in, say, the Justice Department hamstrung and fired by well-connected Regency University grads who don’t “believe in” evolution; and you get thousands, if not millions, of innocent shmucks–in Louisiana, in Iraq–endangered, abused, and sometimes killed.

Now comes Gustav, timed as though by God His Own Bad Self to coincide with the GOP convention in Minneapolis. There is talk that the Republicans will adjust their festivities to turn the event into a telethon, to raise money to help the sure-to-be-devastated region.

Perfect: On Labor Day, the Party that hates Labor and demonizes the very idea of labor unions, turns to the population whose wealth it has funneled up to the already-wealthy. “We’re the party of millionaires and billionaires. Won’t you give us money we can give to those poor people whose homes we’ve somehow been unable to rebuild in three years?”

Still, while Gustav’s arrival as the Ghost of Katrina Past delivers a certain literary satisfaction, we cannot help but sense that something’s missing.

Where is our new Brownie? Where is the next monumental insult to the idea of competence in the public sphere? We, the public, are a poor old battered wife: we feel that, unless the Republican Party isn’t smacking us around (and then blaming us for it), it doesn’t love us any more. To whom can we turn for the next round of abuse?

We turn, like the feller sang, North! To Al-asss-ka!

Here comes John McCain (hear, or at least read, his theme song here and Who’s That Girl?

Continued>>>
http://barbel.wordpress.com/2008/08/31/heckuva-job-palie/