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Hey New York and New Jersey conservatives. You know how helpless you feel right now? Like you just need someone to come give you a hand up out of the shit water, make sure you've got your power back on, and just help you get over the hump in general now that you're down? Millions of other not-you people feel that way all the time. Weird how that works.
As Matt Taibbi points out in this piece in Rolling Stone today Hurricane Sandy and the Myth of the Big Government-vs.-Small-Government Debate, in which he calls bullshit on all the "small government" cry babies who look down out the weak for accepting help when they need it, they're not so quick to turn it down themselves when they fall on hard times. "In the abstract, most Americans want a smaller and less intrusive government. In reality, what Americans really want is a government that spends less money on other people."
Sandy has brought this hypocrisy into stark relief.
Hurricane Sandy is a perfect, microcosmic example of America's attitude toward government. We have millions of people who, most of the year, are ready to bash anyone who accepts government aid as a parasitic welfare queen, but the instant the water level rises a few feet too high in their own neighborhoods, those same folks transform into little Roosevelts, full of plaudits for the benefits of a strong state.
And lest you think this is a poor time to be "politicizing" the tragedy, I think the New Yorker's Amy Davidson makes a brilliant point in response to that nonsense in this piece here, writing "Refusing to have a political conversation about climate change now is akin to the insistence that the aftermath of a mass shooting is somehow an improper moment to talk about America’s gun laws."
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6 comments:
Conservatives don't not want there to be emergency services, they just think the federal government does a poor job of it. FEMA was created in 1979 and has been guilty of mismanaging, most notably in New Orleans which was as bad as it was in no small part because of the crappy job the corps of engineers did in constructing the levies.
More efficiently run government is just another way of saying government that meets my needs and not some other loser's.
I don't want the government to run anything. That doesn't mean I don't want anything.
they mismanaged katrina because george w. bush put a fucking clown in charge of it, who had absolutely no business or background to be in that position. but alas, that's the great conservative ploy, is it not? make government inefficient and then use that as a reason to destroy it.
I think that's more the corrupt nature of politics than a conspiracy.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federal_Emergency_Management_Agency#Criticism
I think Luke is under the impression that conservatives and libertarians are survivalists of some kind. not what it's about
The current republican presidential candidate has said in the past he would like to cut funding to FEMA. Not run it more efficiently. He would prefer it to be state-run or, ideally, privatized. So, it's true that conservatives don't not want emergency services. They just want people to have to pay for it on a case-by-case basis.
Reminds me of the town that voted not to have an all-inclusive fire department and, instead, had people pay if they wanted fire protection, then when some guy's unprotected house burned down, the fire department was criticized.
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