Can someone please bulldoze Denny Hastert?

I mean it.   Can't they tear him down and put up an actual human being?

And while they're at it, how about a rehab on the director of FEMA Michael Brown?

Hastert, a United States Congressman, the Speaker of the House of Representatives, one of the most powerful men in the country, thinks that Katrina did a half-assed job on New Orleans and we should finish the city off for her.

This is from the Times-Picayune's amazing hurricane blog, which unfortunately but understandably wasn't put together with the idea that bloggers like me should have an easy time linking to entries, which is why I'm swiping the whole post.  Scroll on down if you're familiar with Hastert's loutish suggestions that New Orleans isn't worth the trouble or the money:

House Speaker: Rebuilding N.O. doesn't make sense

Thursday, 2:55 p.m.

By Bill Walsh
Washington bureau

WASHINGTON - House Speaker Dennis Hastert dropped a bombshell on flood-ravaged New Orleans on Thursday by suggesting that it isn’t sensible to rebuild the city.

"It doesn't make sense to me," Hastert told the Daily Herald in suburban Chicago in editions published today. "And it's a question that certainly we should ask."

Hastert's comments came as Congress cut short its summer recess and raced back to Washington to take up an emergency aid package expected to be $10 billion or more. Details of the legislation are still emerging, but it is expected to target critical items such as buses to evacuate the city, reinforcing existing flood protection and providing food and shelter for a growing population of refugees.

The Illinois Republican’s comments drew an immediate rebuke from Louisiana officials.

“That’s like saying we should shut down Los Angeles because it’s built in an earthquake zone,” former Sen. John Breaux, D-La., said. “Or like saying that after the Great Chicago fire of 1871, the U.S. government should have just abandoned the city.”

Hastert said that he supports an emergency bailout, but raised questions about a long-term rebuilding effort. As the most powerful voice in the Republican-controlled House, Hastert is in a position to block any legislation that he opposes.

"We help replace, we help relieve disaster," Hastert said. "But I think federal insurance and everything that goes along with it... we ought to take a second look at that."

The speaker’s comments were in stark contrast to those delivered by President Bush during an appearance this morning on ABC’s “Good Morning America.”

“I want the people of New Orleans to know that after rescuing them and stabilizing the situation, there will be plans in place to help this great city get back on its feet,” Bush said. “There is no doubt in my mind that New Orleans is going to rise up again as a great city.”

Insurance industry executives estimated that claims from the storm could range up to $19 billion. Rebuilding the city, which is more than 80 percent submerged, could cost tens of billions of dollars more, experts projected.

Hastert questioned the wisdom of rebuilding a city below sea level that will continue to be in the path of powerful hurricanes.

"You know we build Los Angeles and San Francisco on top of earthquake issures and they rebuild, too. Stubbornness," he said.

Hastert wasn't the only one questioning the rebuilding of New Orleans. The Waterbury, Conn., Republican-American newspaper wrote an editorial Wednesday entitled, "Is New Orleans worth reclaiming?"

"Americans' hearts go out to the people in Katrina's path," it said. "But if the people of New Orleans and other low-lying areas insist on living in harm's way, they ought to accept responsibility for what happens to them and their property."

I know there has been a lot of interesting, and angry, discussions of the roles of race and class in the coverage and reaction to Katrina's aftermath.  It's almost certain that things would be a lot different if the scared and angry faces we keep seeing in New Orleans were predominantly white instead of mostly brown and black.  And it's clear that particularly among conservative commentators there's a failure of imagination and empathy when the lives that have to be imagined and empathized with are the lives of poor people.

You know that Hastert was reacting to images of poor people's flooded neighborhoods when he started picturing bulldozers on the move---Think he's ever read the opening chapter of Seinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath?---and revulsion at the poverty he glimpsed moved him more than an innate pragmatism.

And based on his throwing Los Angeles and San Francisco into the discussion, cities that so far lately haven't needed massive amounts of federal aid, while forgetting to mention all those parts of Jeb Bush's Florida built where they make easy targets for the hurricane gods and which over the last dozen years or so have benefited from billions of dollars of other state's taxpayers' money with no one suggesting that the residents should pack up and move someplace where there is no pesky bad weather or inhospitable geography, it's not unreasonable or unfair to infer that Hastert resents the people of New Orleans for their habit of voting Democratic as much as their need for the Feds to open the national checkbook.

Lot of the talk of letting New Orleans die is wishful thinking.

But I suspect that as ugly and loathesome as Hastert's heart is, his thinking here is motivated more by the reflexive urge of Republicans to come to the aid of their Party's leader.

SGBFB!

Save George Bush From Blame!

The horrors in New Orleans aren't a result of bad budgetmaking decisions, a stupid and failed war sucking up money, manpower, and machinery, an incompetent leadership up and down the line, and a President who is intellectually and emotionally not up to the job of guiding the nation through a time of crisis.

Nope.  It's all the fault of those people's stubbornness and their refusal to accept responsibility.

That word, "responsibility," is the key to their thinking.  Republicans only use it when they are talking about cutting federal help for poor people.  They never use it when they are talking about Bush, or themselves.

The same craven desire to duck responsibility is behind FEMA's Brown's blaming the people who couldn't get out of New Orleans in time for their own troubles.

"I don't make judgments about why people chose not to leave [he said judgmentally] but, you know, there was a mandatory evacuation of New Orleans"...

"And to find people still there is just heart-wrenching to me because, you know, the mayor did everything he could to get them out of there.

"So, we've got to figure out some way to convince people that whenever warnings go out it's for their own good," Brown said. "Now, I don't want to second guess why they did that. My job now is to get relief to them."

His job now.  No mention of his job before.

Brown is in a double-bind.  He has to protect his boss Bush, and he needs to cover his own ass.  Must be hard for him to stifle the urge to yell, "But they took away the money I needed to do the job!"

Fortunately, there are all those poor people and Democrats to blame.
_______________________________________________

Thanks to loyal reader Mac Magillicuddy for the link to the CNN story on Brown.

Related reading:  Wesley Pruden thinks Hastert has given New Orleans the best news it's had all week:

A remark like that from a yankee politician is all the resurrection inspiration the Big Easy could ask for.

Sounds clever, but it's just part of another conservative's effort to get George Bush off the hook.  See Pruden's column in the Jewish World News.

Related blogging:  destor23 at the TPMCafe makes the case for rebuilding New Orleans right where it is.

Comments

[mrs. norman maine]

I'm not sure I would villify Hastert, simply for opening the subject up to debate. Do dozens of wrongs make a right? In other words, just because we know that cities have been built where they shouldn't in the rest of the country, and development is eroding our shorelines -- should we now say that it would be unfair be to make a new, New Orleans adhere to a higher standard?

But, but, but -- There is reason to believe a rebuilt N.O. would be even more vulnerable in the future. Buffering channel islands appear to have been wiped out, and I would think that the wetlands would continue to be vulnerable to development, not to mention the disruption by all the heavy equipment it would take to rebuild the city.

When all is said and done, even a re-engineered New Orleans would still be a city in a bowl that would continue to be vulnerable to hurricanes.

Believe me, it was the city of my imagination, a pilgrimage I always promised myself, and I do find myself buying into the vision of New Orleans rising again -- not an institutional, futuristic city, but one with the same spirit, all of its secret gardens and Cajun mysteries reseeding themselves within a few years. It's a beuatiful thought...

And yet, Hastert's question is a fair one, I have (and I hate to) say. What is the best thing to do for the survivors? Is it really to make them believe that they can move back and never face those ravages again? Or is it to simply to face reality and move to higher ground?

[SAP]

Lance,

Groucho Marx is your man for bulldozing people:

Mrs. Teasdale (with high regard): I've sponsored your appointment because I feel you are the most able statesman in all Freedonia.
Firefly (insulting her): Well, that covers a lot of ground. Say! You cover a lot of ground yourself. You'd better beat it. I hear they're gonna tear you down and put up an office building where you're standing. You can leave in a taxi. If you can't get a taxi, you can leave in a huff. If that's too soon, you can leave in a minute and a huff. You know, you haven't stopped talking since I came here. You must have been vaccinated with a phonograph needle.

- Duck Soup (1933)

[Holdie Lewie]

Mrs. Maine,
Here's where I see a flaw in your thinking: You don't understand the reason that New Orleans exists. It's a port. It's at the mouth of this country's biggest river. It has a reason to exist beyond its charm and its cultural value.

[The Heretik]

If one looks at things in context, humanity is not rational, nor do I think it be too much so. Venice and the Netherlands defy water and reason. Los Angeles defies lack of water, earthquake, and reason. San Francisco defies earthquake, "morality," and reason. New York defies everything. Like New Orleans, all of these places are ports of commerce, but even more they are ports of the spirit, harbors for the spirited homeless, ever witnessing the passage of peoples, jumping with the joy of life.

[carla]

Amazing. Simply amazing.

Over at PK we've shoved the "relief efforts and important blog posts/articles" links to the top.

I'll be including this one.

[Campaspe]

Wonderful, compassionate post, as I have come to expect from you. And kudos for pointing out that curiously, we're not averse to rebuilding things in Florida, which is getting hit on a regular basis these days.

[mrs. norman maine]

Holdie -- Thank you for pointing out to me that New Orleans is a port. What a revelation that is! My point was that the well-being of that great city's inhabitants (especially its most vulnerable ones) should be a higher priority than restoring its mythology.

Your point seems to be -- what? That commerce trumps humanity?

And as Dr. Phil might say: How's that port workin' out for you these days?

[Exiled in NJ]

Great post, Heretik! I was going to liken it, and Lance's words to an essay by Sir Kenneth Clark, but then I saw a Yahoo headline: "Bush Vows to Fix Flaws in Recovery Effort"

Flaws, errors, mistakes. I have this picture in my mind of him trying to say these words, speech coaches telling him how to form his lips to spit them out....some film keeps coming into my mind where someone must admit a mistake but I can't place it. Anyway, now I confidently predict we are ready for the millenium.

[Cindy]

Mrs. NM,

Personally, when I think of GWB trying to say he's made a mistake, I get a flashback to Happy Days' Fonzie: "I was w- ... I was www-- ... I was--I was wwwWWRONG." It was a running joke that he would visibly strain with the effort, dragging the "W" word out by sheer will. So it is with Bush the Lesser.

[Mike]

I agree we should not bulldoze this place, in fact we should INVITE all the former residents back into what is likely the most contaminated, largest toxic waste, superfund disaster site in this country, and well known to be second largest oil spill (first being Valdeez oil spill). It could actually be the first place in this country where we can actually PROVE that cancer cluster do occur in these situations, something we had difficulty proving in Toms River NJ and Love Canal. Oh, not too mention, I you like mold on everything. Toxic Life strangling Mold. Since it will be everywhere. Yes, move Back. In fact, we might as well spend $200 billions on this place just so we can say that we did we could do just to save Gumbo!