Maureen Dowd's "man-caused disasters"

I suppose as a writer, Maureen Dowd doesn’t suck, but as a thinker… that’s another story. And, of course, she is a poster-child for Ronald Reagan’s observation that, “The trouble with our liberal friends is not that they are ignorant, but that they know so much that isn't so.”

In her perennial defense of government and the malefactors who use it to impose their will on us, Dowd starts with a slimy Red Herring: “Should those whose job it is to prepare for the worst be punished because the worst didn’t happen?”

Of course not!, we reply without thinking. But think a little bit more about the question and the answer is obvious: Yes, they should be punished when they do a poor job; when the decisions they are empowered to make are bad decisions.

Dowd continues: “The Republican (Gov Christie) said he didn’t think that Democrats and Republicans were debating this: “Protecting the safety of our citizens is one of the bedrock roles of government.”

Not so bedrock for some of the Flintstones types in Washington who are now hotly debating austerity versus salvation.”

Since when are tax increases synonymous with ‘salvation’? Since when was government the source of our salvation? Dowd has strange gods indeed. Those “Flintstones” recognize something Dowd refuses to: austerity is essential to the salvation of our government and the society that has grown to depend on it.

“The impressively hands-on performances of Christie, Bloomberg and Gov. Andrew Cuomo of New York were not enough to make Tea Partiers, Republican presidential candidate Ron Paul and Republican House Majority Leader Eric Cantor root for big government against rampaging nature.”

No matter how impressively hands-on your government overseers might be, in a contest between them and ‘rampaging nature’, bet on nature.

“Though his state of Virginia was the epicenter of an earthquake before being hit by Irene, Cantor has insisted that additional money for cash-strapped FEMA must be offset by spending cuts, echoing his remarks in May that money sent to traumatized tornado victims in Joplin, Mo., would mean cuts somewhere else.”

The logical fallacies come hot and heavy in a Dowd piece, and sometimes they jumble all together. This one, I think, is either a false dichotomy or more likely a non sequitur. See, Cantor isn’t proposing that the federal government skimp on disaster relief – which to a certain extent is a proper role for government. Just the opposite. He is rationally prioritizing limited resources by taking money away from lower federal priorities to pay for the higher priority of disaster recovery. Something an adult might consider. Something Dowd, Bernie Sanders and well, Democrats in general, never think of. Maybe families, businesses, and local governments flooded out of the Midwest or burned out in Texas or blown out on the East Coast are a greater priority than Big Bird, Dewey Cheatem and How, or that billion dollar enterprise, PPFA. Maybe so, says Mo and Bernie, but they are all more important than current and future tax payers every time.

“In a briefing at the White House Monday, FEMA Director Craig Fugate said that the lesson of Katrina is for the federal government to “get things going earlier” and not wait until an overwhelmed state “says we’re going to need help.”

Too bad that didn’t occur to W. in 2005. He met with Gov. Kathleen Blanco of Louisiana and New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin on Air Force One and correctly assessed that they were not up to the job but then retreated behind clinical states’ rights arguments as a great American city drowned.”

Ah, the Constitution is now “clinical states’ rights arguments” just as the Global War on Terror is now an “Overseas Contingency Operation” and a battle is a ‘kinetic military action’. Perhaps Dowd would have preferred if W. had determined that Nagin and Blanco weren’t up to the job and deposed them both.