Giving Thanks- Wall Street Style

From ThinkProgress we get the Wall Street Journal's "thanks giving" themed editorial opinion from a few days ago. In it, they list 5 things they want to give thanks for this year, most of them snarky and condescending. They include: Eliot Spitzer, our "friends the Mongolians" who were among the most welcoming hosts to Bush last week, Michael Doran at the NSC, pandas who are successfully expanding their population, and, shockingly, the terrible state of public schooling in New Orleans. I quote:

• Catholic schools in New Orleans. That damaged city's public schools remain closed, but at least eight of its 35 private Catholic schools are already back teaching, less than three months after Katrina. Here's a modest proposal to help that city's poorest kids: Don't reopen any of the old public schools, 102 of 117 of which were performing below the state average in any case. Make the entire city a charter and voucher testing ground, and watch the creative spirit of teachers, entrepreneurs and students start to flow.

There's an insane amount of things wrong with this statement, but firstly, it's this: If anybody's curious as to why certain populations of truly quite reasonable Katrina survivors began, en masse, to adopt the completely illogical and frightening perspective that the burst levees was in fact intentional, and that the government's ignorance of their plight and excrutiatingly slow attempts to assist them were intentional, systematic, and brutal- this is the attitude that actually helps to justify that perception.

Can you believe it? The Wall Street Journal truly thinks that the best way to educate the poor is to destroy all the schools that service the poor. As though vouchers and charters for the poor will be employed equally or reasonably in the chaos of New Orleans' infrastructure.