Mississippi's best columnist, Bill Minor, argues today that Katrina has sent Mississippi's Republican Party into disarray, especially over support for the Bush administration:
Is the Grand Old Party — a.k.a. the Republicans — coming apart at the seams? At least among the faithful followers among Mississippi officialdom, that could be the case. Ironically, it seems that Hurricane Katrina and the meltdown of George W. Bush's image as a strong leader are at the core of dissension in what had been such a happy marriage between Mississippi GOPers and the Bush crowd.
You can also throw in several other matters roiling around in the West Wing — Karl Rove's involvement in unlawfully outing the identity of an undercover CIA agent whose husband disproved Bush's WMD "evidence" for attacking Iraq, and the defrocking of House GOP powerhouse Tom DeLay.
From our Mississippi perspective, the GOP hegemony down here seems to have taken a bad turn.
Trent Lott, the state's junior Republican senator, again showed signs of becoming Mississippi's maverick, a la Arizona's John McCain.
Three weeks ago, Lott broke not only with Bush, but his colleague Thad Cochran as well, and voted for McCain's amendment to the Iraq-Afghanistan war appropriation that would bar American military people from using torture or mistreating prisoners taken in the so-called War on Terrorism.
Bush has threatened to veto the entire appropriation if the amendment, adopted with only 9 votes against it (Cochran's was one of them), stays in the bill.
Lott's anti-torture vote came, significantly, at a time when he was also an outspoken critic of FEMA's performance in getting emergency housing into his native Gulf Coast area that was hard-hit by Katrina. And later, he blasted FEMA for bypassing Mississippi contractors for recovery work.
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