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UPDATE by Brian: Robert is too modest to pimp his dKos diary on the FP, so I'll do it for him. Please give it a rec, as the story is certainly worthy of additional eyeballs.
Sunday's article, "How Anti-Union, Anti-Tax OC Conservatives Defeated Adequate Fire Protection in 2005," seems to have struck a nerve among Orange County conservatives. Yesterday the Orange County Register, whose editorials against Measure D in 2005 were a prime target of my article, devoted their lead editorial to the charges I laid out here on Sunday.
It's understandable that conservatives bristle at being called to account for the catastrophic outcomes of their ideological agenda. The devastation wreaked on the Gulf Coast by Hurricane Katrina irreparably damaged the Bush Administration and set the Republicans on the long road to losing the Congress. Millions of Americans saw the effects of Grover Norquist's "drown government in a bathtub" strategy. The Register's editorial pages, long devoted to a similar anti-government, anti-tax, anti-union agenda, have a clear interest in distancing themselves from last week's disaster.
But their editorial defense does not quite achieve its objectives. The Register does not rebut the fact that OC firefighters lacked necessary equipment that Measure D would have funded. More importantly, the editorial actually reinforces my core argument - that the conservative agenda the Register and others in OC promoted is intended to leave Californians lacking adequate fire protection and placing their safety in the hands of a private market.
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