Blink and you'll miss your chance to say something stupid to no one

So this big post I've been promising for the last few days now has pretty much been happening in the discussion over at Adrastos's place where the talk is all C Ray this week. See here, here, and here and you'll see what I'm talking about. Read the exciting comments and you may even manage to piece together what I might have written here. So I really don't need to say anything at all... eh but here goes anyway.

To put it succinctly, the city is sinking and C Ray is letting it happen... and he's doing it on purpose. The administation's cavalier neglect of essential recovery issues such as affordable housing, public transit, criminal justice (particularly the neglect of indigent defense), public education and health services, neighborhood planning, streets, utilities... is simply too consistent to be accidental. It is a policy intended to please uptown plutocrats: Shrink the city, strangle economic development outside of tourism, build condos.

Since I've been recently accused of being too "mopy" I'll point out one positive development in all of this. The sleepy local media seem to be catching on. Particularly astute as of late have been the T-P's Stephanie Grace and Gambit's Clancy Du Bos. Long the official spokesperson of the yuppie mushy middle in New Orleans politics, Clancy seems to have gotten religion as of late. If you read only one smackdown of C Ray this week, make it Clancy's. He gets it exactly right.

That Nagin should secretly champion the very conspiracy he so publicly attacks only adds to the deftness with which he advances the cause. Indeed, he makes the perfect double-agent: He holds the most powerful position in town, yet he stands in front of an impoverished crowd in the Lower Ninth Ward railing against unnamed "powers that be" who allegedly want to grab their land, even though no one else has wanted that land since Bienville first planted a flag hereabouts in 1718; and all the while his "free market" policy of doing nothing that resembles leadership or boldness discourages investment of both public and private capital in the hardest-hit areas, thereby increasing the chances that poor neighborhoods will lie fallow for years to come. If the "powers that be" have any designs on the Lower Nine, it's to keep it fallow, not buy it up.

Mission accomplished.

Grace gets kudos this week for adding that Nagin's approach is born not out of incompetence but out of an idealogical bent he shares with President Bush.

But there's more to the comparison than that: Despite different political parties and vastly different backgrounds, the patrician president and the self-made mayor actually hold similar world views. To boil it down to basics, both trust the private sector more than they trust government.

The result, at the federal level, was a downsized and devalued FEMA -- underfunded and understaffed -- that clearly was not up to the task of dealing with a major emergency.

At the city level, Nagin's approach to rebuilding shows a similar reluctance to exert a heavy hand. The results so far, while not deadly, are frustrating to many looking for signs of progress and guidance on how they can come home.

I could swear we've seen this comparisson represented graphically somewhere before but.. oh yeah. Of course, Grace is also treading too lightly in her description of this policy. It is not only frustrating progress with too light a hand but rather strangling it through intentional neglect. The Bush and Nagin approaches to recovery are exactly the same. Both see their role in governing less as a mandate to employ the tools of government for civic improvement but more like a feudal privilidge from which to dispense favor to friends. Meanwhile those in the greatest need continue to bear the brunt of the punishment. And a city is allowed to die a slow certain death.

Update: David is also unsurprisingly on point here.