Newsbusters caught this telling exchange between MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough and former Obama administration official Melody Barnes this morning. Barnes picks up where President Obama left off Thursday, when he scolded Americans to ignore bloggers and “professional activists who profit from conflict,” comments that ignore the fact that Obama himself was a professional activist who profited from conflict before his political career, and remains one today.
Barnes told Scarborough “It is to everyone’s benefit that people back off of what was the Reagan administration legacy that government is bad, government workers are bad and think about how we’re going to make this work because what we’ve seen time and time again with Katrina and moving forward is if we don’t have an effective federal government people get hurt. In fact people can die.”
Hurricane Katrina is a poor example for Barnes to have used. Like most Democrats, she probably only knows the political history of that storm and not the actual facts of it. The fact is, had New Orleans followed its own evacuation plan, casualties would have been minimized. Had New Orleans’ government not been so corrupt and incompetent, many more of its residents could have escaped the storm. But phantom police officers are no help, and buses submerged in the flood could move no one out of harm’s way. The federal FEMA response was among the fastest in the nation’s history, but then Louisiana Gov. Kathleen Babineaux Blanco (D) stood in the way of federal help. Her chief response was to politicize the storm as her own state’s citizens suffered and died. Blanco was replaced as governor, and former New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin — Democrat, like Blanco — is in legal trouble for corruption.
Scarborough fired back at Barnes, “Hold on a second. why would I though, back off if I think health care policy is bad for the country in the the long run, the federal government is not competent enough to run it, and the launch has been terrible. Sam Stein asks the question are Republicans going to do their best to help this implementation? No, I don’t think they are. And I don’t think it means they are unpatriotic if they don’t.”
When Republicans held the White House and Congress, Democrats said “dissent was patriotic” even to the point of trying to de-fund wars as our troops were engaged in battles. But now, Democrats want to silence all dissent against a massively destructive law that has never enjoyed democratic legitimacy and was built on a foundation of corruption.
They can kindly go straight to Hell.
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