Live from the Nuke Free Zone

Here’s a question. If God Himself charged you with designing one awesome, dramatic event to expose the hollowness of modern conservative rhetoric, could you possibly have done better than Katrina?

Cutting taxes, paring back social safety nets: until disaster strikes and you need to throw money at exactly those programs to help people.

Ignoring global warming, wetlands conservation, environmental science: until the hurricane feeds on that warmth and scours across useless barriers.

Valuing loyalty over competence: until incompetence costs lives.

Ignoring the poor and minorities as irrelevant, or worse: until they cry out at you in anger and pain, and the nation listens.

Throwing away international allies: until they, wiser heads than you, reciprocate dismissal with generosity in your time of need.

Kowtowing to the gun lobby: until the National Guard has to go in and face armed thugs terrorizing their own neighbors in desperation.

Waging war on phantoms in a distant land: until troops are needed for a real emergency, and must be ferried in from neighboring states.

Focusing monomanically on terrorism to the exclusion of basic governance: until the rotted timbers of government fracture miserably when squeezed by real need.

Marginalizing 49% of the nation as disloyal for disagreeing: until not even in the face of disaster can your loyalists disguise your errors.

Unless you can think of something that can do all this and throw in George’s death penalty fetish… well, a certain amount of awe is called for.