Katrina & the Big Dig: It Wasn't Bush's Fault it was --

Tip Oneil's fault. Ten months ago I was writing this about Katrina and Tip O'Neil's remark that "all politics is local:

Katrina revealed that there were weak links in every level: local, state, federal and private. While this is true, the “all politics is local” remark reveals another set of links, firmly forged, that blocked informed efforts at preparedness. (See FEMA’s July 23, 2004 press release on the impact of notional “Hurricane Pam”and the telling photo of the mayor Nagin memorial motor pool). Local, state, and federal politicians have forged a well-oiled mechanism for channeling federal money to local flood related construction projects. These projects, however, are are more related to getting re-elected than to flood prevention.. Our Senators and Congress-critters all understand Tip O’Neil. Federal funds get local votes. Local voters are more likely to respond to appeals to short term interests than to long term efforts to prepare for the next crises.

Now Jeff Jacoby makes a similar point about the newlywed crushed by piece of falling concrete in the Boston tunnel

All politics is local, Tip O'Neil famously said, and it surely doesn't get any more local than when a 6,000-pound slab from a project championed by the late House speaker falls on a 38-year-old newlywed from the Boston neighborhood of Jamaica Plain, crushing her to death as her husband drives her to the airport. O'Neill died in 1994, but the political culture he epitomized is alive and well and enshrined in the Big Dig, a slough of corruption, callousness, and cover-ups that had become a synonym for government mismanagement long before it killed Milena Del Valle on July 10. It would be going too far to link O'Neill to the incompetent workmanship and negligent oversight that led to the collapse of a 3-ton ceiling panel in the Interstate 90 connector just as the Del Valles drove beneath it last week. But the culture that he embodied is still solidly in place.

George Bush was wrong when he said that the country was addicted to oil. It is addicted to Pork.