Megan writes:
[The progressives'] good goverment reforms (combined with the legal culture changes in the 1970s), are the reason that it takes about seventy years to get anything done at any level of government. My father likes to point out that had George Bush come into office saying "Shoring up the levees in New Orleans is my #1 priority" and proceeded to act on that, by the time Katrina hit the Army Corps of Engineers would probably have just about finished the Environmental Impact Analysis on the preliminary bids.
If there had been no lawsuits, that is.
There are always lawsuits.
Does anyone actually believe this? Does Megan? Or does it just sound sort of cutting and droll?
And incidentally, her post, which is another in the genre of "the historical progressives had pretty wide streaks of racism and eugenetics running through their movement" strikes me as very, very weak. Conservatives -- and not just "historical" conservatives, but still living conservatives, like Bill Buckley -- fought to preserve segregation as the law of the land. Fought viciously for it. And then spent 45 years determinedly taking advantage of the passage of the Civil Rights Act to gain lots of votes among quiet racists.
But tell me again how the progressives had "streaks of racism." And tell me again how much conservatives suffer from not only those linguistic associations with their forebears, but their more contemporary attempts to eke a political advantage out of their party's legacy of racism.
