Free association, E.J. Dionne style
E.J. Dionne seizes upon the disaster in New Orleans as today's pretext for his usual Republican bashing. He believes that Hurricane Katrina should cause us to rethink our national priorities, including the war in Iraq.
One might argue that Katrina should cause us to rethink the level at which we fund FEMA, although without more analysis it's not clear that a once-in-a-hundred-years disaster should cause drastic rethinking even on this matter. But what possible bearing does the hurricane have on broader policy issues? The things we are trying to accomplish at home and abroad -- and the way we are going about them -- are no more or less reasonable today than they were last week. Dionne clearly thinks much of what President Bush wants to do is unreasonable. But the fact that a horrific hurricane destroyed a city and caused almost unimaginable hardship provides Dionne no new arguments.
