From Rod Dreher, at the National Review blog:

THE COST OF CRONYISM [Rod Dreher]
It would be very wrong, I believe, to let the ignominious Michael Brown be the scapegoat for FEMA's sins. Check out this front-pager from the [Washington Post]. Turns out that a raft of FEMA's top leaders have little or no emergency management experience, but are instead politically well connected to the GOP and the White House. This is a scandal, a real scandal. How is it possible that four years after 9/11, the president treats a federal agency vital to homeland security as a patronage prize? The main reason I've been a Bush supporter all along is I trusted him (note past tense) on national security -- which, in the age of mass terrorism, means homeland security too. Call me naive, but it's a real blow to learn that political hacks have been running FEMA, of all agencies of the federal government! What if al-Qaeda had blown the New Orleans levees? How much worse would the crony-led FEMA's response have been? Would conservatives stand for any of this for one second if a Democrat were president? If this is what Republican government means, God help the poor GOP Congressmen up for re-election in 2006.

It's encouraging that so many conservatives are acknowledging what I've been saying all along: It's not the policies of the Bush administration, per se, it's the way they are implemented. It's that the sales pitch has become so much more important than what they're actually selling.

I'm going to continue collecting these "honest answers" from conservatives and eventually archive them on a page on the site. If you see any, lemme know.

Labels: in the news