One Year Later

Whether you're a self-styled "small government" conservative (except, of course, when it comes to defense spending boondoggles), or a smug, tiresome "values voter", this is what you wanted:


This is what you got:


Frank Rich has some specifics:

A year after the storm, the reconstruction of New Orleans echoes our reconstruction of Baghdad. A “truth squad” of House Democrats has cataloged the “waste, fraud, abuse or mismanagement” in $8.75 billion worth of contracts, most of which were awarded noncompetitively. Only 60 percent of the city has electricity. Half of the hospitals and three-quarters of the child-care centers remain closed. Violent crime is on the rise. Less than half of the population has returned.

It remains to be seen whether I'm just being paranoid, or if someone's really up to something, but it sure as hell seems to me that this lackluster restoration effort in New Orleans is by design. Debris everywhere still, with even private citizens organizing into groups to clean up lots and blocks.

If I were of a mind to change (or perhaps more accurately, allow to change) the socioeconomic demographic of a disaster-stricken metropolitan area, I'd do what's been done in New Orleans -- nothing. Leave it so the poor black Democratic bloc stays dispersed; let them resettle elsewhere. Stick the remainder in FEMA camps, surrounded with barbed wire, closed from the media, little better than criminal detention facilities, until they take the first opportunity to just get the hell out. Leave the crap and muck and debris around for a while, let the property values continue to drop.

I would be very surprised if next spring does not turn out to be billed as some sort of New Orleans renaissance, with development and rebuilding and gentrification. The "right" people will see their profitability go through the roof, while the "wrong" people will be priced out of ever returning. And the demographic transformation -- perhaps really just a somewhat less vicious form of ethnic cleansing -- will be complete. Literally without doing much of anything.

In the meantime, heckuva job. Kanye West was only partly right. It's not that George W. Bush doesn't care about black people, it's that he doesn't care about people who are no political utility to him. If they're not gonna vote, donate, or evangelize for him, then they're of no use.