Drowning the beast.

For years, Republicans and rightwingers have been selling the notion that taxes are bad, and cuts in government services are good. Now comes the deluge in New Orleans, and the Bush Administration's appalling inability to save thousands of Americans from the horror that unfolded there.

The pictures and news reports were unbelievable--people waiting, starving and dehydrated, fending off the looters and the thugs as a convention center and a famous football stadium became death traps. The elderly slumped on baggage carousels at the airport--some dead, some dying. The contrast between the enormous wealth of our country, with its massive stadiums and transportation infrastructure, and the desperate human suffering, the collapse of civilization and humanity in New Orleans, made a shocking picture.

Is this the vision of America the anti-government ideologues have in mind? The wealthy buy their way out of trouble when disaster strikes, and the poor, the elderly, the disabled, and the weak are left in the direst of circumstances?

If Americans woke up to see our country looking like the most afflicted of Third World nations, it's no accident that it happened on the watch of an Administration that has determinedly cut spending on social services and infrastructure. The Bush Administration denied the Army Corps of Engineers request for $105 million for hurricane and flood protection for New Orleans last year--cutting it down to about 40 percent, leaving the levees that burst unrepaired because they didn't want to spend the money to get the job done. And this same Administration decided to try to make its tax cuts for the wealthiest citizens permanent, even as New Orleans drowned and Baghdad burned.

In the 1980s, they started using the phrase "starve the beast" to describe a deliberate effort to drive up deficits through tax cuts so that the government can no longer afford to maintain many federal programs. The goal, in Grover Norquist's memorable phrase, is to "get the federal government down to the size where we can drown it in the bathtub."

These starving and drowning metaphors should give Americans pause as we look at New Orleans. The real human cost of the dismantling of civil society has been on graphic display there.

By siphoning money away from emergency relief, sending 35 percent of Louisiana's National Guard to tend to Bush's folly in Iraq, remaking "Homeland Security" so its focus is on high-profile military and anti-terrorist missions, Bush let the basic job of defending our country from disaster--whether natural or manmade--go by the boards. And the idea that somehow government, except for the military, is bad, and huge tax cuts and the resulting cuts in federal spending are good, has helped get us where we are today.

If President Bush can gloss over the wanton destruction in Iraq, making it seem like a snap to bomb a country and destroy its infrastructure, then rebuild a shiny new democracy on the ashes, it's harder to paint a pretty picture here at home. The enormity of the tragedy kept revealing itself. America watched the continuing story of the struggling survivors, and journalists were on hand as the dead in the nursing homes and hospitals all came to light.

Surely, some proponents of a saner, more civilized government will step up and insist that this is not what America is about. Surely, the Democrats will now find the guts to say no to the permanent tax cuts for the top 1 percent.

The enormous destruction we are witnessing today could have been prevented. And once disaster struck, our government could have turned its full attention to saving the people of New Orleans.

Americans can look right past the President's cheery photo ops with disaster victims and see for themselves what a society looks like that puts the interests of the rich first, and turns its back on everyone else. It's an ugly sight.

Even rightwing ideologues seemed taken aback by the hurricane's aftermath. David Brooks cut loose with some unusually harsh criticism of his beloved Bush Administration on the NewsHour with Jim Lehrer right after the flood--using words like "ashamed" to describe his reaction to the President's response to Katrina's victims. It was a uniquely critical response. Brooks quickly recovered and, in his Sunday column in The New York Times, went back to the difficult work of putting an optimistic spin on the Administration's work, comparing Bush to a modern-day FDR, and predicting a marshaling of the "armies of compassion" in New Orleans that will remake both the city and America's understanding of the effectiveness of conservative yet public-spirited government.

Good luck.

America is on to this Administration. Bush's speeches can't cover up the facts about his crony appointments to FEMA--an agency that used to enjoy widespread, nonpartisan admiration and is now synonymous with lethal bungling.

A lot of people are making the connection between the policy of callousness toward the poor in this Administration and the humanitarian nightmare in Katrina's wake.

Freshman Congresswoman Gwen Moore of Milwaukee represents an area that has pockets of black unemployment as high as 59 percent.

"Even now I am smarting at the thought of treating the Gulf region as the only place where people are poor," Moore says, pointing out that the Bush Administration has dismantled some of the very housing programs that are desperately needed to serve people displaced by the hurricanes, and the poor generally.

"I think we have an opportunity to say to this Congress and this Administration that the problems of blight and poverty and lack of opportunity are nationwide," Moore says of the current crisis.

It's not just tornadoes or earthquakes or terrorist attacks that can leave people stranded, Moore points out: "How about breast cancer? A major illness and you have no insurance? How about losing your job that had you solidly in the middle class and then they moved it overseas? Just one personal disaster is enough to put any of us in the proverbial Superdome situation."

Moore thinks now is the time to ask, "Are we going to care about Americans as a community, or are we going to push this idea of American individualism to its ultimate extreme?"

Like David Brooks, conservatism itself may be suffering a kind of moral breakdown, triggered by the irrefutable evidence that for all its pious posturing, it is actually very much in the wrong. The whole Bush approach to governance is tearing our country apart.

Ruth Conniff is the political editor of The Progressive.