New Orleans is sinking. One of the oldest cities in the country, a city that's spent time under almost all of this continent's colonial masters, a city instrumental to maintaining American freedom and economic sustainability, is dying. This is a bona fide tragedy, perhaps the worst of the many, many we have experienced in the last five years.
This should be a time that's beyond politics. This should be an event that forces us to look through our petty political differences and work together for the good of those affected. Now is the time to put partisanship aside and work together to get something-- anything-- done in Washington.
To which I say, don't buy into that naive shit again.
We have seen this attitude floating around before. After September 11th we were told that politics was dead. That our tragedy required fast solutions, that debate was a time-consuming and costly luxury. We were told that, as Democrats, our job was to keep silent and support the President in his good-faith policies to stop terrorism. Many Democrats posting on this very site agreed with that idea. Most Democrats in Washington agreed with it unquestioningly.
And President George W. Bush took all of that good faith and political capital and used it to do exactly what he wanted. He passed the USA PATRIOT act to roll back civil liberties that big government Republicans had been after since the Church Committee. He led us into a war in Iraq that he and his advisers had been planning long before he new the name Osama bin Laden-- and led us there with such needless alacrity that our regular military troops are ill-supplied and our vital National Guardsmen (who should have been fixing the levee in New Orleans) have essentially been drafted. He used 9/11 to justify tax cuts, giveaways to oil companies, subsidization of airlines, gulags in Cuba and Iraq, and unbridled war profiteering. He used our great national tragedy to get things he had always wanted, and it didn't matter AT ALL whether they were effective responses. It was all just political capital to him. Meanwhile, Osama bin Laden runs free. Al-Zarqawi, whose life was spared in order to make the case for war more compelling, coordinates insurgency tactics in Iraq. Terrorism strikes London and Spain, and continues to threaten us more than ever.
There is no reason to believe that George W. Bush will not use our new tragedy to justify his own, pre-existing political priorities again. This is how he operates, and after 5 years of "working with him", Democrats know his modus operandi. We cannot let him fool us again. We cannot let him use the death of New Orleans the way he used the deaths of 3,000 New Yorkers.
In the next few weeks we will hear calls to stop debating and "get something done". That "something" will most likely mean a major deregulation of the oil industry, tax cuts for oil-related businesses, weakening of environmental standards for refineries, and opening up American oil reserves to drilling-- particularly the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. Democrats have the power to stop this, or at least to show the media how blatantly cynical and unproductive this is. We have a responsibility to do so.
We are long past the days where it was ok for a Democrat to vote for the PATRIOT Act without even reading it. We are long past the days where the weightest matter in front of a given representative is a Presidential blowjob. Politics is serious today. It represents matters of life and death. At long last it's time to expect our political representatives to do their job with a level of seriousness. We cannot afford to get fooled again.