Emperor Bush appears naked on your T.V.

Tonight, the President gave a breathtaking speech in which he defined poverty as a function of racism, government redistribution as the solution to poverty, and the feds as the lead agent in reconstruction after Hurricane Katrina. All that and you get to pay for it!

The silliness actually went all the way to a plan for government run website to serve as a clearing house for charitable giving. As if any idiot with a big heart, a visa card and a mouse couldn't find a worthwhile charity to give to without a government program.

The President seems to have abandoned any shred of conservative principles that may have survived his first five years in charge of this massive, inefficient government. The speech, and the program outlined, are far more LBJ then Ronald Reagan.

As the Cato Institute points out, the President's plan is based on fallacy:

In "Hurricane Economics," Alan Reynolds, a Cato senior fellow, writes: "The alleged 'fiscal stimulus' of $62.3 billion of debt-financed federal funding in the hurricane-afflicted cities is pure illusion. The notion that replacing destroyed property will somehow boost the economy is, as economist Walter Williams reminds us, the old 'broken window fallacy' exposed by Frederic Bastiat in 1848.

"Breaking windows may create work for glaziers, but property owners whose windows were broken will then have less money left over to spend on something more enjoyable. Society then has to devote scarce real resources to this unfortunate task, rather than another. Meanwhile, interest expense on the extra $62.3 billion of national debt is a burden on taxpayers, not a free lunch."

This program also assumes that the feds can use tax payers money to alleviate poverty. 35 years and trillions of dollars wasted on poverty programs prove the absurdity of this belief.

Even more vexing is the realization that the "Republicans" in Congress, who are anxious to show there compassion and engagement leading up to the mid-terms, will not only pass this massive expansion of government (estimated at up to 200 billion dollars), but will likely add there own pet projects and drive the costs, both monetary and social, through the roof in the rush to out-compassion the other guy. We all know that Bush will never veto legislation and this, no matter how expensive or how badly designed, will not be the first.

I hope my conservative friends are reading this and asking themselves how they would feel about Bush's speech and Bush's New Deal-like vision for reconstruction (and the war for that matter) if it were a Democrat in power and making these proposals.