The New New Orleans

Whiter and Righter. Another example of Bushco's strategy of constructive chaos, whereby cronies get fat do-nothing contracts, ostensibly to "rebuild" or "reconstruct," while the opposition is flooded, bulldozed, or bombed out of existence. Or at least out of relevance. The inimitable Digby provides the following from Frank Rich's Times Select op-ed about Katrina:

Hullabaloo

Douglas Brinkley, the Tulane University historian who wrote the best-selling account of Katrina, “The Great Deluge,” is worried that even now the White House is escaping questioning about what it is up to (and not) in the Gulf. “I don’t think anybody’s getting the Bush strategy,” he said when we talked last week. “The crucial point is that the inaction is deliberate — the inaction is the action.” As he sees it, the administration, tacitly abetted by New Orleans’s opportunistic mayor, Ray Nagin, is encouraging selective inertia, whether in the rebuilding of the levees (“Only Band-Aids have been put on them”), the rebuilding of the Lower Ninth Ward or the restoration of the wetlands. The destination: a smaller city, with a large portion of its former black population permanently dispersed. “Out of the Katrina debacle, Bush is making political gains,” Mr. Brinkley says incredulously. “The last blue state in the Old South is turning into a red state.”

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