Demagogue

The Associated Press interviewed First Lady Laura Bush on Tuesday and wrote this article afterward. Notice the not so subtle excuse that Mrs. Bush offers for why poverty-related issues were not on the administration's radar screen in pre-Katrina days:

[Laura Bush] said she also hopes for a broader national discussion of poverty and race.

"I think it's really important for us to talk about it in a different way," said Mrs. Bush, who over three decades ago taught elementary students at an inner-city school in Houston and was a school librarian in a poor Austin neighborhood.

The next three words are my favorite.

Without offering specifics, she urged policymakers to tackle not only improving education so that poor and minority children have a leg up in life, but increasing the amount of affordable housing stock and the jobs available to those who most need them. She pressed for job training programs ....

"Because of the devastation on the coast, there will be a neighborhood and a housing discussion that'll be possible that really was not possible before," she said.

This is a subtle yet ridiculous notion that the First Lady is trying to advance. It wasn't possible for the Bush administration to have a serious conversation about poor neighborhoods and the challenges their residents have faced?

Katrina's destruction certainly raises the sense of urgency around housing and poverty issues, but the White House could easily have broached these issues years ago if the Bush gang had really given a damn about it.

I'm sure it's merely a coincidence that this administration discovered the poverty issue after its feeble response to a hurricane made it look uncaring and drove its poll numbers downward. When George W. Bush talks like John Maynard Keynes and when Laura Bush starts sounding like a 21st century Jane Addams, you know this administration is running scared.