I don’t know if Hurricane Gustav is going to deliver a devastating hit to the Gulf Coast but it will be a significant storm that produces a lot of damage. And…it will be have political ramifications. The Republicans know that they cannot afford another failed response. The federal government needs to perform, and if they perform well enough they may even be able to turn it into a plus for them. More likely, however, the storm will simply remind the public of the Bush administration’s second biggest failure. While New Orleans’ levees failed and it citizens drowned, Condi Rice went shoe-shopping on Fifth Avenue and George W. Bush ate birthday cake with John McCain.
McCain knows he’s vulnerable. That’s why he is traveling to Mississippi with his running mate to send the message that they care. That’s why Bush has canceled his Monday speech at the Republican convention. And that’s why John McCain is saying he might deliver his nomination speech from the ‘disaster zone’. The Republicans are in a bind because they can’t allow themselves to be seen fiddling in Minneapolis while the Gulf Coast burns. But they also can’t allow themselves to be seen as overcompensating for their failure during Katrina. An acceptance speech from the disaster zone is overcompensation.
We’re all very concerned for Americans in the path of this storm. Yet, the timing of this storm is some kind of divine justice. It’s as if all the souls that succumbed to the Katrina floodwaters have whipped up Hurricane Gustav and sent it to breech the levees protecting what remains of the Republican Party. Gustav will slam into the mainland just around the time the Republicans planned to start their convention, and that timing will not be lost on anyone that harbors even a modicum of superstition.
The best the Republicans can do is to show concern and make sure the federal government does a competent job of taking care of the victims. They seem to understand this but it remains to be seen if the Bush-led federal government is capable of competence. And McCain’s making a mistake if he’s serious about accepting the nomination from the disaster zone. That will be seen as exploitative and defensive at the same time.
They will focus on the responsible preventative actions taken by Gov. Jindal. This will ‘prove’ that a REAL (aka GOP) governor does the right thing: handles it on a state-run level. Since he has made all the advance preparations in the world, this will be successful in swaying fence sitters. ‘Dems really fucked it up too, you know.’ Wonder how many fence sitters there are on the Katrina issue, though.
Nah, I think the cake-cutting ceremony while Katrina drowned is powerful enough – all of my super-conservative New Orleans area relatives may not suddenly be Dems, but they sure hated Bush after that.
They aren’t gonna win votes in LA, no. There is this problem in the rest of the country. I’m visiting with some ‘impending’ family in KY. They still think no one should have been living there, it should all be turned into a giant port and energy production zone, that ‘they’ deserved it and that ‘they’ are idiots for wanting to stay/rebuild. Jindal’s ‘success’ (predetermined, regardless of what actually happens), will only ice that cake. Far as I can tell, everyone around here agrees.
we were discussing the ‘impending family’ last night. Rumors you eloped?
I’m still single, ladies.
Oh, man…. Of course it should have been individuals born there who should have pulled themselves up by their bootstraps and moved, rather than a government-sponsored relocation project. How do they feel about any city in any desert? Houses near the ocean? On hillsides?
It was front-page AP news here in Mad City that they couldn’t count on the levees holding…and then one week later–tah-dah!–Gustav and Hanna show up.
I hope that they are scared. I hope that they pee in their pants. All the This Old House and Extreme Makeover-House Edition shows aren’t going to make a hella lot of difference if those levees won’t hold.
Even just “inspecting emergency shelters” with his new playmate reeks of crocodile tears. He’s no president — he’s an absentee senator and Palin is the governor of America’s most hypocritical welfare state ath the other end of the country. There’s nothing for him to do there, much less Palin, although it would not come as a surprise if he introduced some grandstanding and irrelevant bill in the Senate designed to inspire sentimental photo ops.
The Dems won’t step into this, so it’s up to us to remind everybody that this would not be such a crisis if the damage from Katrina had been a Bush/McCain priority.
I still want somebody to put an ad out of McCain and Bush eating cake with the tagline, “They Ate Cake. While New Orleans Drowned.”
I also want to see McCain give his acceptance speech at Jackson Square, and to see New Orleans residents shout him down and turn the speech into an embarrassment.
McKept chose Palin to steal attention away from Obama’s acceptance speech the next day. Now this.
All I can say is that knuckle-dragging cretins from Focus on the Fascists should take care not to “pray” for bad things to happen to other people.
Surf to the Denver Post, look at the Opinion->Letters section, click on the “Looking back at the DNC” and you will see an excellent letter about this very issue.
http://blogs.denverpost.com/eletters/2008/08/31/looking-back-at-the-dnc-5-letters/
There is a certain justice in this happening during the Repub convention. I hope that everyone is evacuated and that the storm is nowhere near as devastating as Katrina-the people of NO have been through enough.
Totally OT, but are you coming to our town next week? I’m hoping we can get together. 🙂
I agree. See the other front-page article…I found a Kos-commenter-inspired video that not only shows McKept and Shrub literally eating cake, but reminds of us McKept’s votes against legislation to help after the storm.
Unfortunately, we won’t be up there next week, but we will later in the month!
email me with details!
Talk about "divine justice" — remember those rightwingers who prayed that God would make it rain on Obama’s speech to the DNC? Well, God answers prayers, as they say, just not always the way you might expect.
http://www.michaelmoore.com/ has a letter on this very topic. His next to last paragraph:
I, too, have enjoyed the fact that instead of getting traction on their GOP message, they are having to address retraction of their incompetence and meanness and everything that is vile in human nature due to Gustav.
But, more worrisome for LA, there is another storm tracking right behind Gustav. Hopefully Gustav will have cooled the ocean before the next hits it.
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God’s parayer answered for McSame :: Bush knows when he’s not wanted at the RNC next to Bush III.
WASHINGTON – President Bush is skipping the Republican National Convention on Monday and will travel instead to Texas to meet with emergency workers and evacuees as Hurricane Gustav bears down on the Gulf Coast.
The White House had announced earlier Sunday that Bush and Vice President Cheney would skip the convention’s opening day. First lady Laura Bush still was scheduled to address delegates in St. Paul, Minn., on Monday, the opening day.
Bush said he would travel instead to Austin, Texas, and San Antonio to meet with emergency workers and evacuees and check on preparations. He said that for now he would not go to New Orleans. “I do not want my visit to impede in any way the response of our emergency personnel,” Bush said. “I hope to be able to get to Louisiana as soon as conditions permit.”
He said state and federal emergency officials already were preparing for the worst and that meals, water, cots, blankets and doctors had been put in ready position.
"But I will not let myself be reduced to silence."The “divine justice” sentences were a joke, right? The situation might be tangentially karmic, or ironic, but I’d leave the “divine” out of it.
You’d be the first (and probably were) to condemn Falwell and Robertson for their remarks about 9/11. I wouldn’t commit the same “sin” were I you.
I’m superstitious enough to believe in divine retribution. Beyond an irony. My thoughts and prayers are with the people along the gulf coast today.
Remembering the televised images from Hurricane Katrina still fills me with a profound sorrow and deep shame for the failures of the government. The incompetence of the White House was written on every abused, neglected, abandoned face. It was horrific-in fact, it is still difficult to even think about. Is just a government that’s competent too much to ask for?