ROVE'S KATRINA STRATEGY FOR TURNING LOUISIANA RED WORKING-- WITH A LITTLE HELP FROM REPUBLICAN HACKS LIKE HASTERT AND LIEBERMAN

"He's never had an original thought in his big fat head," is what Tom DeLay might have told close associates after he had come to grips with the fact that he was too divisive a figure to ever be made Speaker, causing him to make an obscure but genial congressman from rural Illinois, Denny Hastert, Speaker of the House. "When I tell him to jump, he'll ask how high. It can't be too high or we'll have an earthquake when he lands." Hastert did whatever DeLay told him to-- nothing more, nothing less-- until DeLay was indicted on criminal charges and forced to resign from Congress in disgrace. By then congressmen thought Hastert was actually in charge. And Republicans liked him a lot more than they liked The Hammer. Vultures like Roy Blunt and Jerry Lewis found him easy to push around. Unfortunately, the former high school wrestling coach, long rumored to be a closeted homosexual and definitely surrounded by a cabal of less closeted gay advisors, isn't all that bright.

Not many Republicans would say it publicly but, unguided by DeLay, Hastert's reaction to the Hurricane Katrina catastrophe in New Orleans was not unique inside the GOP caucus. "It looks like a lot of that place could be bulldozed," Hastert told the media, while people were still dying because of Bush Regime incompetence and indifference.

Hastert said that Congress ought to ask "some real tough questions" about whether to allocate federal funding for the job of restoring one of America's most beloved cities. The House Speaker's suggestion that "it makes no sense" for Congress to rebuild a city that is seven feet below sea level might sound like a warped version of conservative "tough love" if the man who is second in the line of succession to the presidency after Vice President Dick Cheney had been similarly dismissive of plans to rebuild coastal areas of Mississippi and Alabama.

Unlike New Orleans, a 300-year-old city with a rich history but not a particularly rich populace, some of the hardest-hit areas of Mississippi and Alabama were upscale waterfront communities that have been built up in recent years, as real-estate developers have claimed more and more coastal wetlands for their oceanview projects.

But those Republican-leaning areas, which are home to people like former Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott, R-Mississippi, were spared Hastert's talk of "tough questions."

New Orleans, a city that invariably votes for Democrats, a city filled with the "wrong kind" of gays (not closeted), the wrong kind of Latino immigrants (not Cubans) and with African-Americans not at all like Clarence Thomas and Ken Blackwell (not self-loathing capos), isn't the kind of city Republicans want to see thrive, especially not at taxpayers' expense.

Yesterday former FEMA chief Michael "Brownie, you're doing a great job" Brown, shed some new light on the Republican attitude towards the tragedy.

Brown told a group of graduate students Friday that some in the White House had suggested the federal government should take charge in Louisiana because Blanco was a Democrat, while leaving Mississippi Gov. Haley Barbour, a Republican, in control in his state.

Brown, speaking at the Metropolitan College of New York, said he had recommended to President Bush that all 90,000 square miles along the Gulf Coast affected by the devastating hurricane be federalized-- a term Brown explained as placing the federal government in charge of all agencies responding to the disaster.


"Unbeknownst to me, certain people in the White House were thinking, 'We had to federalize Louisiana because she's a white, female Democratic governor, and we have a chance to rub her nose in it,'" he said, without naming names. "'We can't do it to Haley (Barbour) because Haley's a white male Republican governor. And we can't do a thing to him. So we're just gonna federalize Louisiana.'"

On the record Brown refused to identify Karl Rove as the mastermind behind the Republican response. Louisiana Governor Kathleen Blanco was less reticent. "This is exactly what we were living but could not bring ourselves to believe. Karl Rove was playing politics while our people were dying. The federal effort was delayed, and now the public knows why. It's disgusting."


So while Senate Homeland Security Committee Chairman "independent" Senator Joe Lieberman (elected last November because of nods and winks from Bush, Cheney and Rove to Connecticut Republicans) did a disgraceful about-face on holding the Bush Regime accountable for their lack of adequate response to Katrina-- dooming the floundering political career of one of his last Democratic allies, reactionary Senator Mary Landreiu-- Blanco is fighting for her political survival against a right wing congressman who nearly beat her last time, Bobby Jindal. With toss-up states like Minnesota, Montana, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Virginia, New Hampshire, trending more and more Democratic, it looks like Rove's Katrina murderous strategy, helped along by a grateful Lieberman, will turn one toss up state, Louisiana, red.