"'My goal is to cut government in half in twenty-five years, to get it down to the size where we can drown it in the bathtub.' - Grover Norquist, 'Field Marshal' of the Bush Plan"

Conservatives, better than anyone, know that the image of infanticide has powerful emotional force. But ironically, it's progressives this time around who were using Grover Norquist's frequently quoted and much scorned quote above to turn the tables on Washington's elite cabal of conservative movers and shakers having their weekly strategy meeting on L street.

Working Assets, an orgaization that "helps busy people make a difference" organized an event that showed just how crude and dangerous Mr. Norquist's ideas about government really are. Activists rented a truck whose cab was flanked by two twin billboards, featuring Field Marshal Norquist's famous quote juxtaposed with an image of the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina - a drowned New Orleans. Appropriately, at 8:45 this morning Working Assets parked the truck in front of the offices of Americans for Tax Reform, an essential part of Norquist's New Right brigade, and the meeting place for that weekly breakfast strategy session of rightist revolutionaries.

With the conspicuous truck parked squarely in front of Americans for Tax Reform's locked-down offices, a sizeable handful of activists, with original chants that point to America's shameful standards in high school English curricula, courted media photographers while making their presence known to the planners of the watery death of American government. "246810 What if a hurricane comes again? 13579 Your rich friends will be just fine." Someone missed that 9th grade lesson on meter.

Aside from the lockdown and the fleeting press attention, the protest didn't have quite the effect one might have wanted it to have. Most of the breakfast's attendees slipped past the vocal protestors into the building's underground garage (I imagine, with their fully equipped luxury SUV's). The few who walked by were predictably "stony-faced", said Andrew Boyd, the event's organizer.

Boyd will be taking the graphic-laden truck to what he calls "the twelve stations of the cross of the conservative movement," such as the offices of the CATO institute, the Republican club, and the Heritage Foundation. (We hope the Heritage interns can see the billboards from their magical balconies.) And true to its progressive, grassroots inspiration, the eight days of diesel-fuelled activism has been funded by only a few days' worth of $5+ donations from people like you and me, not by some establishment organization funded by, say, a world-renowned billionaire investment banker with progressive political leanings. Boyd wanted us to note that in particular. Don't worry - we at CAP didn't take it personally.

Ibrahim Abdul-Matin, a New Yorker from Oakland, California's Movement Strategies Center and a participant in the protest, was impressed by the compelling image of New Orleans awash in mucky floodwater aside Norquist's contemptable quote. "[When Katrina hit,] the state of nature was revealed," Abdul-Matin said. "It's a metaphor for the fact that we're not the epitome of civilization."

"This is the bathtub," he said, gesturing to the image of beleaguered New Orleans.

Well, sort of. The drowning baby isn't government. It's real children, as well as adults and the elderly, the sick, the poor, the black. In our society, the most vulnerable. That's why the image is so jarring - and for some, distasteful. But it's hard to disagree with Working Assets' ultimate message: "[Katrina] wasn't just a natural disaster," Boyd told me as the protest wound down. "It was a man-made disaster."