Katrina Straw Man Watch

I've seen it once or twice so far, and usually it's been poorly articulated, but I'm curious to know: how long will it be before we get serious attempts at a right-wing starve-the-beast explanation for FEMA's role in the Katrina fiasco?  Along the lines of something like this:

FEMA screwed up so badly with the whole Katrina thing blah blah blah I told you the federal government can't be trusted.  Blah blah blah the answer is not to try to make FEMA better blah blah blah make it even smaller and less significant.  Blah blah blah private sector.

Has anyone seen tried seriously?

-- Michael

UPDATE: I guess the answer to my questions above, "how long will it be," is "about 7 hours."  Must be something in the water, because Ezra found one this morning, not surprisingly, from Tony Snow.  Ezra also outlines what the Democratic answer should be to privatization nonsense:

This is a pretty constant conservative fallacy when it comes to privatization. The market may encourage efficiency, but only if it works like a market. When politicians run the bidding, that's never assured. If you let corrupt pols privatize, the privatization will be corrupt. And if they have a tendency to install campaign cronies in positions of power, there's no reason to expect they won't award contracts in exactly the same manner. So forgive me if I don't quite see the efficiency gain in trading an incompetent individual who helped on the campaign for an unqualified corporation that donated to the campaign. Halliburton's "misplaced" how many billions in Iraq now?

Moreover, nothing, nothing is inherently inefficient about the public sector. Some corporations turn out to be corrupt, like Enron, or inefficient, like any number of bankrupted, bloated brands, and some government agencies do the same. But some don't.[...]

Bush's decisions transformed a remarkably efficient government agency into a fatally incompetent one, so conservatives want to let him do it a second time. It's completely insane. This isn't a private vs. public debate -- contrast Clinton's FEMA with Bush's version to see that. But the right would much prefer that it was. Democrats should make sure voters understand that Bush took a superb organization and destroyed it by handing control to a politically-connected incompetent.

I think that's about right.  Focus a little more on the cronyism, throw something in there about how it's important to have competent people in positions of power, people who are experienced and qualified to do the job, how it's too bad that our republican government doesn't take it's responsibility to the American people serious.  Whittle that down to some talking points and some campaign ads (lots of cake-cutting, guitar-playing Bush also) and it seems like you have a '06 campaign strategy.  We want to come to Washington to clean up the mess made by the little babies in power.  You get the idea.

(Thanks to other Michael for the catch.)

Comments

[Incertus]

Wizbang has done it--no link because I refuse to give them the time of day--and they're doing it couched in that race-conscious, southern-strategy language, so they get to blame both government and blacks at the same time.

[Michael]

I haven't seen a Grover Norquist-esque Katrina piece yet. But my mom did forward to me for debunking a bit of "blame the welfare state" crap the other day. The "drown it in the bathtub" schtick can't be far behind.

[Michael]

And we have a winner! Ezra has a post up this morning, quoting from Bainbridge and saying "Follow the ooze and you'll find the argument in its natural habitat -- Tony Snow's head. Snow, of course, has built a career dressing viciously dishonest statements in a fine Italian suit of exasperated sanity. Here he lauds the private sector's remarkable mobilization against Katrina and blasts FEMA's fatally flawed response, ending in a call for the complete privatization of disaster relief."

[the exile]

Response to your update: Cronyism is indeed the magic key that links FEMA incompetence to everything else Bush has done in office. It may be the winner issue for 06. But it's not just cronyism; it's POLITICAL cronyism that puts the PARTY above the nation and party spin above the truth. Why was Clinton's FEMA destroyed? Because Bush deliberately turned it into a massive slush fund to buy votes in Florida. And Brownie was actually pretty damn good at that part of the job. So this is the TV spot: GWB has made America unsafe because he has put LYING REPUBLICAN PARTY HACKS into positions that need honest and competent professionals. In a dangerous world, do we want a President who will protect all Americans, or a man who only cares about winning elections, no matter what it takes? Putting it this way links all the memes into one: the lying, the incompetence, and the partisan assalt on our basic democratic values and institutions.