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All of which is why the whole, bungled Bush response to Katrina has amounted to throwing good money after bad. Way too much money has been appropriated overall, but far too little has been put to good use. And the one creative free-market approach to rebuilding a storied city and region, the Baker bill which is designed to recoup money for taxpayers at the back end of the process rather than waste it through the ordinary free-spending bureaucracies, is the one that the Bush administration -- for reasons murky and perhaps uncharitable or even Machiavellian -- has opposed with all its might.

Memo to Bushie: You're doing a heckuva job.

TO BE CLEAR, CONSERVATIVES EVERYWHERE should want to rebuild New Orleans, or at least the 85-90 percent of it that modern engineering makes feasible and safe. For if conservatives are not for preserving what is best of our culture, what are we for? The Crescent City's historic architecture, its status as the birthplace of jazz, its historic importance as the means of opening the West and as the site of the greatest victory of the War of 1812, all argue that this world-renowned metropolis should rise again, better than before but with the best of its character intact, as a monument to the efficacy of conservative solutions applied to special and important circumstances.

Finally, if conservatives value commerce and agriculture, New Orleans must continue to thrive. Its port is the nation's largest by tonnage, the fifth largest in the world, and its health is vital for the health of the farmers throughout America's heartland. Cement, steel, and rubber, meanwhile, all flow upriver to the industrial Midwest. And much of the nation's seafood is spawned in Louisiana's marshes and harvested from its waters.

In sum, the President was correct when he said in Jackson Square on September 15 that "There is no way to imagine America without New Orleans." But his own administration's lack of imagination is condemning New Orleans to ruin.

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