This worries me. Note the added emphasis. The clip comes from a piece in tomorrow’s Post about yet another huge funding bill the president will roll out tomorrow for Katrina aid, which the Post says will cost more next year than the entire cost of the Iraq war thus far …
Bush and Republican congressional leaders, by contrast, are calculating that the U.S. economy can safely absorb a sharp spike in spending and budget deficits, and that the only way to regain public confidence after the stumbling early response to the disaster is to spend whatever it takes to rebuild the region and help Katrina’s victims get back on their feet.
Regain public confidence in who? Is the nation undergoing a crisis of confidence in itself?
Put that passage together with this one in Mike Allen’s piece in the Time and I think you see where we’re going …
By late last week, Administration aides were describing a three-part comeback plan. The first: Spend freely, and worry about the tab and the consequences later. “Nothing can salve the wounds like money,” said an official who helped develop the strategy.
What’s driving this budgetary push is not <$Ad$> a natural disaster but a political crisis, the president’s political crisis. The White House is trying to undo self-inflicted political damage on the national dime.
You don’t have to be a conservative or a budget-hawk to be deeply worried about what’s happening here. It’s not even a matter of the dollar value in itself, though this country has already been pushed to the budgetary edge and just doesn’t have an infinite number of hundreds of billions of dollars it can spend.
Intentions are everything. Intentions dictate actions and actions have consequences. The two can never be teased apart.
Many people — and to my chagrin and regret I include myself partly in this number — were seduced into a sorta kinda support for a hypothetical Iraq war. Not the war George Bush would fight, certainly. But one that would be fought on liberal principles and with internationalist means, one about human rights and democratization, one about strengthening a concert of nations that would police malefactor states. Something on the order of NATO’s war in Bosnia, perhaps.
Pick your pipe dream. It almost doesn’t matter.
If there’s nothing else this decade has taught us it is that there was never and never could have been any Iraq War separated from the goals and intentions of those with their foot on the accelerator. Anything else is just a sad delusion. That’s why the whole mess is as it is now: fruit of the poison tree.
Same here.
Maybe you want to spend $200 billion on rebuilding the Delta region too. Fine. Something like that will probably be necessary. But don’t fool yourself into thinking that what’s coming is just a matter of a different chef making the same meal. This will be Iraq all over again, with the same fetid mix of graft, zeal and hubris. Cronyism like you wouldn’t believe. Money blown on ideological fantasies and half-baked test-cases.
You could come up with a hundred reasons why that’s true. But at root intentions drive all. You’ll never separate this operation or its results from the fact that the people in charge see it as a political operation. The use of this money for political purposes, for what amounts to a political campaign, tells you everything you need to know about what’s coming.
