Will McCain And Palin Suspend Campaigning To Save The Gulf Coast From Ike?

McCain rushed down to the Gulf Coast and chased Hurricane Gustav around for a few days, trying his best to milk the publicity value that it might have been worth had it gone from  Cat 3 to Cat 4, rather than from Cat 2 to Cat 1. At least he was able to avoid having to endure live appearances of the discredited heads of his party, George Bush and Dick Cheney, at his convention.

The lobbyist brigade driving the Double Talk Express made the most they could out of Gustav's rainy, windy weather, even managing to project McCain's own repulsive opportunism onto Barack Obama's selfless endeavor to raise money for potential victims while McCain was busy raising headlines for himself.

Yesterday Hurricane Ike pounded the Caribbean islands, killing scores of people and is now heading towards the Florida Keys. It is expected to hit the Gulf Coast by Wednesday. "Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal said so-called "hurricane fatigue" should not prevent people there from leaving their homes for the second time in 10 days." Will it prevent McCain and Palin from their antics? Bush has already declared an official state of emergency for Florida-- but can it really be "official" until McCain and Palin get there to exploit the media?

McCain's Disgraceful Opportunism In The Face Of Gustav

So while McCain and Palin rush willy-nilly-- I wonder when the crash course on Neocon foreign policy with Randy Scheunemann starts-- to New Orleans to take advantage of the devastation from Gustav and use it as a backdrop for their campaign, Obama is mobilzing his donor and volunteer base to actually help out. Last spring it was exactly the same thing in Iowa when the Mississippi flooded. McCain ran for the photo-ops, disrupting rescue operations and siphoning off crucial assets to meet his campaign needs. Obama helped raise money for the victims.

With Gustav heading right towards New Orleans this morning, Obama told reporters in Lima, Ohio, "We can activate an email list of a couple million people who want to give back. I think we can get tons of volunteers to travel down there if it becomes necessary."

Obama said was planning to "stay clear of the area until things have settled down and then we'll probably try to figure out how we can be as helpful as possible."

Asked whether rival John McCain's visit to Mississippi Sunday was appropriate, Obama said concern about deadly storm is not a partisan issue.

"The thing that I always am concerned about in the middle of a storm is whether we're drawing resources away from folks on the ground because the Secret Service and various security requirements sometimes it pulls police, fire and other departments away from concentrating on the job," Obama said.

"I'm assuming that where he went that wasn't an issue."

One of the more vicious of the brigade of McCain's crooked lobbyists, Rick Davis, immediately projected McCain's sickening opportunism onto Obama.

Told Obama had criticized McCain and Palin on the campaign trail over pay equity, Davis continued: "So he attacks us while there's a hurricane going on and John McCain suspends his convention basically. What bigger contrast can you have about putting your country first?"

What a pathetic clown. At least he didn't bring up McCain's time in a cell in Hanoi. As John Arovosis put in at AmericaBlog yesterday:

Obama could have talked about how McCain going to the hurricane zone was irresponsible, self-aggrandizing, and endangered the lives of those in the region whose leaders would better spend their time evacuating their citizens rather than holding court with John McCain. Obama could have talked about how tacky and sleazy and opportunistic it is for John McCain to be considering using the Hurricane Gustav disaster zone as a backdrop for his political convention acceptance speech. Obama could have talked about McCain's vote against the Katrina Commission to hold the Bush Administration accountable for their disastrous non-handling of the previous hurricane. He could have talked about McCain's vote against extending unemployment benefits to Katrina victims. He could have talked about McCain's vote against Medicaid for Katrina victims. He could have talked about McCain voting against funding the Army Corps of Engineers. He could have talked about McCain seeking and receiving the endorsement of Pastor John Hagee after Hagee said Katrina was God's punishment against New Orleans.

And finally, Barack Obama could have talked about how John McCain went and ate cake with George Bush while people were literally dying in New Orleans as Hurricane Katrina struck. Hell, Obama could have, and should have, made this photo into a TV ad that he should run doing the entire Republican convention this week.

But Obama didn't do any of that.

This morning's NY Times is warns that "Officials predicted devastation for towns in its path, tidal surges of up to 14 feet and possible destruction of parts of New Orleans still recovering from Hurricane Katrina... With memories of the shaky response to Hurricane Katrina fresh," Bush and the Republicans are biting their nails and hoping nothing happens they get blamed for. McCain may even miss the convention entirely and just accept the nomination on a video feed from the Gulf Coast, avoiding having had his speech compared to Obama's.

Convention planners and delegates in St. Paul said, and McCain advisers acknowledged, that it could be politically perilous to continue the convention as the Gulf Coast braces for the arrival of Hurricane Gustav. The Bush administration’s unsteady response to Hurricane Katrina, which left New Orleans in ruins three years ago, outraged Americans, drew criticism from Mr. McCain and remains, for many, a stain on President Bush’s record.

As unintended consequences go, Hurricane Gustav does present some political opportunities for Mr. McCain. He looked like a man in charge on television Sunday as he described meeting with Gov. Haley Barbour of Mississippi and federal disaster officials. The tumult may also limit comparisons, which may have been unfavorable, between the Republican convention this week and the Democratic convention in Denver last week, where Mr. Obama’s acceptance speech drew more than 40 million television viewers.

There were 11 members of Congress who refused to help the victims of Hurricane Katrina in 2005-- naturally, all extreme right Republicans:

Joe Barton (R-TX)
Jeff Flake (R-AZ)
Virginia Foxx (R-NC)
Scott Garrett (R-NJ)
John Hostettler (R-IN, who lost his re-election bid)
Steve King (R-IA)
Butch Otter (R-ID)
Ron Paul (R-TX)
Jim Sensenbrenner (R-WI)
Tom Tancredo (R-CO)
Lynn Westmoreland (R-GA, who was still trying to memorize a few of the 10 commandments)

Last night ABC-TV reported that in the interim since Katrina, the Bush Regime has done next to nothing to fix the problems. "Despite Congress authorizing $12.8 billion to rebuild the levees, only $3 billion has been spent." A levee expert was quoted saying that what Katrina didn't destroy, Gustav will:

"Huge areas of Louisiana are going to be devastated. We're going in essence to see what Katrina didn't destroy, what Rita didn't destroy in 2005 being destroyed now in 2008," said Ivor Van Heerden, a professor at Louisiana State University who wrote a book about why the levees broke during Katrina.

Dobson Fails To Get Satan To Rain On Obama's Parade But McCain Ready To Turn Gustav Into A Photo-Op

I've said for months that in mid-October when McCain's numbers are still struggling to get into the low 40's, he'll go with the ultimate strategy: the Manchurian candidate will try tarring Obama as the anti-Chist. I've been told they've thoroughly tested this strategy in small backward towns in Tennessee and Kentucky and that it works fairly well on people with 2-digit IQs, much of the GOP's southern base. I still don't see how that's going to get McCain's numbers from, say 38-39 up above 45. But you probably already saw McCain's One video. To a sane person it looks like a joke. To the Buy Bull thumpers, it's deadly serious. They even have their crazed websites up and e-mail chains going.

One of the worst of the charlatan preachers fleecing the 2-digit IQ flock is Jimmy Dobson, head of a GOP Front operation called Focus on The Family. Although they have now scrubbed it from their website, one of Dobson's more heinous lieutenants, Stuart Shepard, a former weatherman turned crooked religionist, tries persuading church-goers to pray for rain on the night Obama gave his acceptance speech in an outdoor arena. God must have heard and overruled Satan, because it was the most beautiful night of the year. And Dobson was foiled. What kind of a man asks God to send torrents of rain so hard that it will block out network TV coverage so no one will be able to see or hear Obama's speech during the convention? Shepard defended his nutty video in an interview with KOAA. Anyway, the actual video they scrubbed is below.

Maybe God was pissed off enough that He decided to send Gustav towards America, just in time to disrupt the Republican Convention in St Paul. First McCain was thinking he could turn the coming disaster in his favor by using it as an excuse for Bush to not show up at the Convention, because, after all, Bush has always been so concerned about victims of hurricanes. Last time there was a big one, in fact, he and a certain Arizona senator were so busy eating birthday cake that they didn't bother doing anything at all while the residents of New Orleans were drowning.

Since then, though, McCain has been talking about scrapping the convention altogether (or at least postponing it until Rove can run another week of negative ads smearing Obama) and staging some kind of show of concern by the Forces of Evil for the folks who get hit by the Hurricane God is sending to show how much he disapproves of Republicans. Yes, they're hoping to "turn Republicans into Red Cross-type volunteers who would help collect donations, food and goods for storm victims."

McCain, who just made the most cynical choice of running mates in American history, showing absolutely zero regard for the good of the country, yapped on Fox about his campaign motto being "America First" and how "helping people during an emergency will take precedence over accepting the nomination... It wouldn't be appropriate to have a festive occasion while a near-tragedy or a terrible challenge is presented in the form of a natural disaster." SO instead McCain will go down to the Gulf Coast and try to capitalize on the problems while getting in the way-- seriously in the way-- on rescue operations. He's really a disgusting excuse for a human being. He did the same thing when there was flooding in Iowa. Does McCain think natural disasters are sent solely to provide him with opportunities for campaign backdrops?

It is genuinely revolting to think of a Cat 4 or 5 hurricane as a marketing op, but this is, after all, a country run by a man who let himself be photographed carrying a fake turkey to feed soldiers in Iraq. So I wonder if the Obama team has given any thought to what a spectacular PR coup this will be. And the bar for Republicans to "succeed" is particularly low. All Bush needs to do is to ensure that less than 1836 Americans end up drowning in their own waste, as they did the last time a hurricane struck during a Republican presidency to declare Operation Hype The Hurricane a triumph.

Meanwhile, brutally authoritarian-type police sweeps of the Twin Cities are seeing round-ups of potential protesters already-- kind of like Communist China's response to peaceful protesters at the Olympics. There is a problem with postponing the convention, though. If they change the date, does that mean that all the Republican senators and House members who had "previous appointments they couldn't get out of" that week, can now come? I mean would it really be a Republican Convention without Gordon Smith, Susan Collins, Ted Stevens, Pat Roberts, Mike Johanns, Roger Wicker, John Sununu, Liddy Dole... not to mention half the Michigan Repug congressional delegation? And of course there's the Larry Craig problem. They finally persuaded him to stay away from the city where he so grievously disgraced himself and exposed their collective hypocrisy, but the following week, he'll be in court in St. Paul for another appeals hearing. So... would he actually miss the convention and the parties (and the party boys) if he was actually in town? McCain better decide what's gonna be worse, Larry Craig or Gustav.