If you were looking for righty-bashing blog posts related to the Moore, Oklahoma disaster, Daily Kos was the place to be this past Wednesday.
Ian Reifowitz argued that conservatives' childish hostility to government regulation boosted the tornado's death toll because neither state nor local law requires safe rooms or shelters, and that absent a mandate, such life-saving structures quite often won't get built. Reifowitz wrote (emphasis added):
Free market conservatism kills? Yes, that's right...[T]here were no rules in Moore or anywhere else in Oklahoma mandating that buildings...have so-called "safe rooms" or underground shelters to protect people during a storm...
What happened in Moore is outrageous, and represents a(nother) failure of conservative ideology, an ideology built around faith in the free market and a reflexive rejection of regulation. This kind of Ayn Rand-based extreme thinking claims to exalt "freedom" of the individual, but what it does in reality is force individuals into a death race where, in order to compete on cost, they have to cut corners -- putting themselves and others at risk if something goes wrong -- or lose the race. If the chances of disaster are relatively small, too many will choose to cut those corners...
...Freedom does not mean the right to not build an underground shelter because no pointy-headed government regulator's gonna tell me I have to. That's the "freedom" of a five-year old who won't eat his broccoli and spills his plate on the floor...
Also on Wednesday, blogger "pierre9045" claimed that Republicans aren't just mean-spirited and stingy but also inconsistent, since they're keen on disaster relief for red states like Oklahoma but not for blue states like post-Sandy New York and New Jersey (emphasis added):
...[T]here is no person in this country who is not at risk of the kind of tragedy that occurred in Moore, Oklahoma, that occurred in West Texas, that occurred in Bangladesh, that can and eventually will occur in every part of this world...
Everyone faces times of need, times of hardship, and everyone deserves help during those times. But in the Republican world, only the brethren get help. Everyone else can just f--k off...
"Pierre" went on to opine that the GOP's stubbornness, greed, and "tribalism" make it unworthy to hold power:
...[T]he ideals of the Republican party reflect tribalism, selfishness, and zero-sum games, while the Democratic party's reflect unity, humility, and leaving a better world to our descendents...
...[T]here really is no room for Republicans in the world we are living in. So long as the people in this country are facing unpredictable, deadly, natural as well as man-made disasters, medical care that needs to be provided, life-altering climate change that needs to be managed, and the turmoil that comes with living paycheck to paycheck, Republicans and their supporters are dead weight to the rest of us...But then, there's no denying that Republicans are also a demographic of the people with whom we need to plan on sharing this better world, because they are likely not going to change their ways anytime soon. The best we can do is get them out of the way, as in out of our government...
