JABbering Stooge

Shorter Dennis Prager:

Liberals’ Desire To Be Loved Is Their Achilles’ Heel

Some liberals are decent people, despite their lack of morals and their hatred of America, but their flaws outweigh their virtues and therefore it’s okay to shoot them like rabid dogs in the streets.

* Text for “shorter” shamelessly stolen from zsa’s comment at Sadly, No!

You know, I just couldn’t let the second anniversary of Hurricane Katrina go without posting some news about disaster-relief related cronyism and corruption.

As I’ve mentioned before, my mother is a church administrator for a local baptist church. After Katrina, she also started doing volunteer work for Texas Interfaith/Interagency Disaster Response (TIDR). It was through her work for TIDR that she learned of this official Letter of Protest sent by National Voluntary Organizations Active in Disaster (NVOAD) to the Department of Health and Human Services, and the subsequent response rejecting the protest out-of-hand.

Apparently, DHHS sent out a RFP for case management services in times of disaster that was structured in such a way as to effectively preclude participation by volunteer and nonprofit organizations - probably in favor of oh, say, Halliburton and Blackwater Security. They’ve done such a bang-up job so far, why not turn everything over to them?

You know, as much as conservatives like to claim that only laissez-faire capitalism will provide everyone with ponies, unicorns, rainbows and candy, they have this disturbing penchant for promoting policies that are anything but free market and, rather conveniently, benefit their oligarchical/monopolistic patrons. Often to the detriment of society as a whole.

It’s official. America is in danger of losing its status as second-to-none in just about every measurable category. First, the heavy industry sector, such as steel production, moved overseas to reduce costs. Labor-intensive manufacturing followed soon after, for much the same reason - because sweatshops are so much better than good old American ingenuity, I guess. As a result, we’re no longer the world’s number one producer of manufactured goods.

Then problems started cropping up in our financial sector. As with industry, there was a steady drip, drip, drip of scandal after scandal, from the Savings and Loan crisis (which culminated in the Keating Five) to the dot-com bust to Enron and now the subprime mortgage crisis. It didn’t help matters that the European stock market closed higher than its American counterpart for the first time since World War I back in early April.

Now, we’re losing our intellectual edge.