Posted 10:47 AM by Gene

Who needs TIMESREJECT?

For decades now, we have been witnessing the slow, ruthless dismantling of the nation's urban infrastructure. The crumbling levees in New Orleans are only the most conspicuous evidence of this decline: it's evident everywhere, from Amtrak's aging track system to New York's decaying public school buildings.

Rather than confront the causes of that deterioration, we are encouraged to overlook it, lost in a cloud of tourist distractions like casinos, convention centers, spruced-up historic quarters and festival marketplaces.

The inadequacy of that vision has now become glaringly obvious. And the problem cannot simply be repaired with reinforcement bars or dabs of cement. Instead, our decision makers will have to face up to what our cities have become, and why....

This represents more than a loss of nerve. It is an outgrowth of the campaign against "big government" that helped propel Ronald Reagan to the presidency 25 years ago. And it was fueled by uglier motives, including a latent fear of cities, a myth of the city as a breeding ground for immorality.

So! The EEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEVIL RONALD REAGAN DESTROYED URBAN AMERICA!!!!!

It took a lot of people to do it: machine politicians who stuffed every last municipal office with drunks and do-nothings, and built roads to nowhere; black extremists who all but declared crime a right, and their white liberal cronies who cringed approvingly out of guilt; cowardly businesses that ran screaming to the suburbs, and the middle class that ran screaming at the sight of the first black man; educrats who sat on their big fat duffs with their big fat tax revenues persuing every fad and chasing learning out of the classroom; social engineers building Rube Goldbergs like busing and letting vagrants live anywhere, and watching them collapse in a sordid heap; "urban renewal" projects that gutted neighborhoods for lifeless office complexes and welfare traps; RENDELLS with their Babbitt-like touting of condos and restaurants and ballparks and the decayed and taxpayer-dependent arts, and their hastening of the obscene civic divide between rich and poor. Heck if we're going to blame presidents let's blame IKE, who built the Interstates that hastened urban flight. No, it took more than one man to destroy urban America.

This is why no one misses TimesReject's columnists. They say the same thing all the time.