Krugman: Killed by Contempt

"[T]he federal government's lethal ineptitude wasn't just a consequence of Mr. Bush's personal inadequacy; it was a consequence of ideological hostility to the very idea of using government to serve the public good. For 25 years the right has been denigrating the public sector, telling us that government is always the problem, not the solution. Why should we be surprised that when we needed a government solution, it wasn't forthcoming?"

I'm still surprised, perhaps because I never imagined to what extent that the Bush administration carried out its cynical mathematics.

During lunch, my friend Andrew Boucher told me about some discussions equating the Paris August 2003 heatwave deaths (estimated at 22,000) and the Katrina deaths (in the thousands for the moment) because both situations involved marginalized segments of the population, unimportant for political purposes, with the implications that "natural disasters" of this sort are almost "programmed in", at last factually if not intentionally.