Tuesday, September 27, 2005

Gung Ho: I don't know if Bush is panicking from his low approval ratings, overreacting to the whopping criticism he got from the Katrina issue, or is being an opportunistic fool.

But now he wants to put the Pentagon in charge of domestic disaster responses. This almost seems like the type of government fallacy that goes something along the lines of:

We must do something.

This is something.

Therefore, we must do this.

There's a reason why the military should stick to destroying things. I don't want our armed forces having a larger presence in domestic affairs any more than they have to. Now, they do have a role in the domestic portion of War on Terrorism, because it is a war that's being fought, in part, on U.S. soil. But natural disasters, while they have some similar characteristics to unnatural ones, are a different breed. We can fix FEMA without militarizing it.

The military operates as a force that doesn't mesh well with a free society. Granted, in major disasters you sometimes have to temporarily curtail some rights. But militarizing every big disaster is overkill. Plus, I don't want the military to become the default answer for every domestic problem in the future.