Bush, Rove, and the bathtub

Grover Norquist, the conservative ideologue who serves as the fountainhead of many of this administration’s domestic policies, likes to quote himself as saying that he doesn’t want to abolish government, but simply reduce it to the size where he can drag it to the bathroom and drown it in the bathtub.
On the second anniversary of the submersion of New Orleans by Hurricane Katrina, it might be time to stop and reflect, once again, on the effect that the Bush-Rove axis has had on the perception of the role of government.
It is simply too easy to dismiss this as an inept administration, and the response to Katrina as symbolic of it. What happened in New Orleans is, I believe, part of a larger picture. Conservative idealogues like Norquist, and his old buddy Karl Rove, are happy to make policy that starves government; the horse is now not only ridden by an unwilling jockey, but is also hobbled. Then, when an occasion demands action that only government can supply, such as response to disaster, its pathetic performance is denounced by everybody as how all government is good for is taking your tax money and buying guns for psychotic postmen with it, and none denounces it louder than the very people who crippled government in the first place.
Now, it may be coincidence that a fool became president and an ideologue his vizier; it would not be the first time. I am not one of those who say that black people do not matter to Bush. (Although I am one of those who say that nobody matters to Bush but his closest buddies, some of whom are pigmented.) Neither do I say that Rove was responsible for the non-response to Katrina. I do say, however, that Rovian policy of starving funds to government agencies diminished government response, Bush’s ineptitude (in the appointment of Brownie, and in the aftermath of Katrina) ruined the public face of government, and what drowned, in consequence, along with New Orleans, was government credibility. Nice for Mr. Norquist, isn’t it?