Katrina and bathtubs

Grover Nordquist, whose place in the Conservative Pantheon I'm unsure, famously said that he wanted to shrink the size of government until he could strangle it in the bath tub. (I hope I got the attribution right on that, apologies if not).

One of my recent crazy consipracy theories is that the federal response to Katrina both demonstrates success and an on-going committment to that ideal by the republican leadership in this country.

I have, of course, been long convinced that the federal response to Katrina was terrible. It started as a gut check and then as more evidence came to light, it became a reasoned conviction and more and more Americans see it that way too. Why was it so terrible? We just faced calamity a short while ago down the road in Manhattan. What's the difference between a cataclysmic man-made device going off in New Orleans vs. the hurricane, from an after-the-fact perspective? They are surely comparable.

There are plenty of specific time-and-place reasons (starting with no-cred's "heckofajob Brownie").

But I believe there is a larger reason behind it. It's a direct result of "starving the beast" over the last period of time of republican leadership and, I suspect, even more cynically a deliberate attempt to further that goal.

Some people are thinking to themselves, "hey, they botched it so badly, and there is such a strong negative reaction to how they handled it, they have to do a better job next time".

I'm thinking that they got the precise result they wanted (where "they" is an admitedly shadowy no-name group of starve-the-beast masters, whoever they are). The precise result was this: reduced confidence in the federal government. As the public loses confidence and faith in the federal government to handle these things, the public will look anywhere and everywhere for help, except the federal government. Reduced confidence and lowered expectations play right into their hands.