Paul Craig Roberts has some sort of mental illness that is getting progressively worse. I am serious, the guy needs help.
Yeah, what is it with this guy anyway? I don't think he was always this screwed up ... ?
How New Orleans Was Lost
by Paul Craig Roberts
Chalk up the city of New Orleans as a cost of Bush's Iraq war.
There were not enough helicopters to repair the breached levees and rescue people trapped by rising water. Nor are there enough Louisiana National Guardsmen available to help with rescue efforts and to patrol against looting.
The situation is the same in Mississippi.
The National Guard and helicopters are off on a fool's mission in Iraq.
The National Guard is in Iraq because fanatical neoconservatives in the Bush administration were determined to invade the Middle East and because incompetent Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld refused to listen to the generals, who told him there were not enough regular troops available to do the job.
After the invasion, the arrogant Rumsfeld found out that the generals were right. The National Guard was called up to fill in the gaping gaps.
Now the Guardsmen, trapped in the Iraqi quagmire, are watching on TV the families they left behind trapped by rising waters and wondering if the floating bodies are family members. None know where their dislocated families are, but, shades of Fallujah, they do see their destroyed homes.
The mayor of New Orleans was counting on helicopters to put in place massive sandbags to repair the levee. However, someone called the few helicopters away to rescue people from rooftops. The rising water overwhelmed the massive pumping stations, and New Orleans disappeared under deep water.
What a terrible casualty of the Iraqi war – one of our oldest and most beautiful cities, a famous city, a historic city.
Distracted by its phony war on terrorism, the U.S. government had made no preparations in the event Hurricane Katrina brought catastrophe to New Orleans. No contingency plan existed. Only now after the disaster are FEMA and the Corps of Engineers trying to assemble the material and equipment to save New Orleans from the fate of Atlantis.
Even worse, articles in the New Orleans Times-Picayune and public statements by emergency management chiefs in New Orleans make it clear that the Bush administration slashed the funding for the Corps of Engineers' projects to strengthen and raise the New Orleans levees and diverted the money to the Iraq war.
Walter Maestri, emergency management chief for Jefferson Parish, told the New Orleans Times-Picayune (June 8, 2004): "It appears that the money has been moved in the president's budget to handle homeland security and the war in Iraq, and I suppose that's the price we pay. Nobody locally is happy that the levees can't be finished, and we are doing everything we can to make the case that this is a security issue for us."
Why can't the U.S. government focus on America's needs and leave other countries alone? Why are American troops in Iraq instead of protecting our own borders from a mass invasion by illegal immigrants? Why are American helicopters blowing up Iraqi homes instead of saving American homes in New Orleans?
How can the Bush administration be so incompetent as to expose Americans at home to dire risks by exhausting American resources in foolish foreign adventures? What kind of "homeland security" is this?
All Bush has achieved by invading Iraq is to kill and wound thousands of people while destroying America's reputation. The only beneficiaries are oil companies capitalizing on a good excuse to jack up the price of gasoline and Osama bin Laden's recruitment.
What we have is a Republican war for oil company profits while New Orleans sinks beneath the waters.
* * * * *
On the day Katrina devastated New Orleans, America lost its most optimistic pundit, Jude Wanniski, who died of a heart attack at age 69. Jude often misplaced his optimism, but he was never without it. Jude never gave up on anyone and would invest his persuasive talents on everyone who would listen and even on those who wouldn't. Jude was not an economist, but he understood long before most economists that fiscal policy changed incentives and affected aggregate supply in contrast to the Keynesian emphasis on aggregate demand. Jude rose to fame as the publicist for supply-side economics. As a journalist, he was a natural. Robert Bartley, the Wall Street Journal editorial page editor, once told me that Jude had the best nose for news of any journalist he had ever known. Those he favored with his missives will miss his insights.
What a terrible waste it is to lose one's mind.
Is this guy a Buchananite? Wasn't he once a conservative or am I thinking about someone else?
Paul Craig Roberts is an economist and very fiscally conservative. He has been a good conservative until Bush was elected.I think he is basically an isolationist and therefore very much against the Iraq war and Bush. I have noticed his increasing virulent attacks against Bush.
After reading his article, I think you got the "progressive" part right.
I am kind of inclined to agree with you, and not just because of Roberts' unorthodox opinions.
I was initially opposed to the Iraq war, and while not 100% opposed to free trade, have my doubts. So I used to enjoy reading Robert's articles on these topics.
Somewhere along the line though, he went from being a rather interesting iconoclast to being strident and shrill to the point of lunacy. It's one thing to say going into Iraq was a bad idea, it's another to call Bush a terrorist.
I think maybe his feelings are hurt by the reaction of his old friends to his columns, and is dealing with it in the worst way possible.
I agree with that assessment (and have posited that same theory here several times over the past three years). There was a time the man was a serious columnist, published in regular newspapers and everything. I believe he was even a member of the Reagan Administration. His deterioration has progressed steadily and I hope he has friends who can steer him to people who will provide careful and sympathetic professional help. No joke.