[Mb-civic] A Poverty of Thought - George F. Will - Washington Post

[William Swiggard]

A Poverty of Thought

By George F. Will
Tuesday, September 13, 2005; Page A27

It took exactly one month -- until the president's prime-time news 
conference of Oct. 11, 2001 -- to refute the notion that Sept. 11 
"changed everything." When a reporter said, "You haven't called for any 
sacrifices from the American people," he replied, "Well, you know, I 
think the American people are sacrificing now. I think they're waiting 
in airport lines longer than they've ever had before." And that was 
before the sacrificing became really hellacious with the requirement 
that passengers remove their shoes at security checkpoints.

The idea that Hurricane Katrina would change the only thing that matters 
-- thinking -- perished even more quickly, at about the time Louisiana 
Sen. Mary Landrieu, a suitable symbol of congressional narcissism, 
dramatized the severity of the tragedy by taking a television 
interviewer on a helicopter flight over her destroyed beach house. 
"Washington rolled the dice and Louisiana lost," she said in a speech on 
the Senate floor that moved some senators to tears. You can no more 
embarrass a senator than you can a sofa, so the tears were not 
accompanied by blushing about having just passed a transportation bill 
whose 6,371 pork projects cost $24 billion, about 10 times more than the 
price of the levee New Orleans needed. Louisiana's congressional 
delegation larded the bill with $540,580,200 worth of earmarks, 
one-fifth the price of a capable levee.

America's always fast-flowing river of race-obsessing has overflowed its 
banks, and last Sunday on ABC's "This Week," Sen. Barack Obama, 
Illinois's freshman Democrat, applied to the expression of old 
banalities a fluency that would be beguiling were it without content. 
Unfortunately, it included the requisite lament about the president's 
inadequate "empathy" and an amazing criticism of the government's 
"historic indifference" and its "passive indifference" that "is as bad 
as active malice." The senator, 44, is just 30 months older than the 
"war on poverty" that President Johnson declared in January 1964. Since 
then the indifference that is as bad as active malice has been expressed 
in more than $6.6 trillion of anti-poverty spending, strictly defined.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/09/12/AR2005091201260.html?nav=hcmodule
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