In the wake of the Federal clusterfuck that is his administration’s response to Katrina — including everyone noticing he’d put a guy incompetant to run horse shows in as head of FEMA — Bush announced yesterday that the new point man for the Gulf Coast reconstruction effort will be…
Karl Rove. What. The. Fuck? First he suspends Davis-Bacon, thereby ensuring that whoever does the rebuilding gets to pay the local workers — the ones with no homes, remember — less than the prevailing local wage. Then he puts another non-disaster-qualified guy in charge, who if anything is worse than Brown. Rove is a political hack with a track record of politicizing everything he touches. He does no substantive work; his job is to get somebody elected and protect them once they’re in place. What the hell he can bring to a reconstruction effort — beyond spin for Bush — is a mystery to us.
There’s real news to be reported — how the president is approaching the reconstruction, what plans he’s putting in place right now. He’s put his chief political operative in charge of running the reconstruction of the Gulf Coast. Shouldn’t that be raising a lot of questions — a man whose entire professional experience is in political messaging and patronage? He’s also at the center of on-going criminal investigation and the target of a much-rumored indictment. But set that aside. Then there’s what Rep. John D. Dingell (D-MI) said in his statement out this evening. “With a stroke of the pen, in one of his first Katrina directives, the President cut the wages of the workers who will undertake our largest reconstruction project since the Civil War.” That cuts right to the heart of the matter. The president’s first major initiatives were deep wage cuts for the people who will do the reconstruction.