Politics & Power Quote by Kit Bond

Patriotism is doing a lot of cleanup work here. Kit Bond’s line, delivered in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, tries to carve out a small, unassailable patch of competence inside a national story defined by institutional failure. The phrasing is telling: “very proud,” “one of our,” “magnificent job.” It’s the language of ceremonial gratitude, the kind that turns a catastrophe into a stage for local virtue and political credit-sharing.

Bond’s specific intent is defensive and affiliative. By “pointing out on the floor,” he’s marking the official record and signaling to constituents back home that Missouri (his Missouri) showed up when the country needed help. The National Guard becomes a proxy for state pride and, by extension, his own stewardship. In a moment when federal leadership was widely criticized, he redirects the spotlight to a unit that performed well and to an act of deployment that can be framed as decisive, practical, and non-ideological.

The subtext is an attempt to launder the larger fiasco through a smaller success. Bond doesn’t name FEMA, the delayed response, the images of abandonment in New Orleans. He doesn’t have to; the audience already has those pictures. Instead, he offers a counter-image: engineers building, restoring, fixing. It’s a shrewd rhetorical pivot, because engineering battalions imply tangible results rather than political promises.

Context matters: post-Katrina rhetoric often oscillated between accountability and consolation. Bond chooses consolation with a side of appropriation, praising public servants while quietly converting their labor into a political asset.