The Nostalgia Party 0
The good old days weren’t, unless you are Ron Paul.
Dick Polman comments on the point-counterpoint of Paul’s calling for the end of FEMA in the midst of flooding and death from a tropical storm. A snippet:
Actually, the answer to those questions is, quite literally, yes.
Here’s Paul again, arguing last Friday that Washington should go back to the good ole days, when it played no role in disaster preparedness or response: “We should be like 1900. We should be like 1940, 1950, 1960. I live on the Gulf Coast. We deal with hurricanes all the time. Galveston is in my district.”
What’s wrong with those remarks? Pretty much everything – starting with the fact that Paul didn’t even bother to visit his congressional district after it was hammered in 2005 by Hurricane Ike. Most notably was Paul’s invocation of 1900, which happens to be the year when Galveston was decimated by a hurricane that killed upwards of 8000 people (as vividly rendered in the book Isaac’s Storm).
In Libertarian World, elegant theory trumps messy reality any day of the week and twice on Sunday.
