More McCain Treachery

Apparently having learned nothing from the political windfall that fell into his lap from the simple act of staying on the sidelines with his mouth shut and letting his two fellow Democrats beat each other unconscious with stop signs, cheese graters, cookie sheets, and two-man kayaks, RINO nominee John Sith McCain leaped back into the fray he enjoys so very much and started swinging away at his favorite target:

­Senator John McCain took direct aim at the Bush Administration on Thursday as he stood in the lower Ninth Ward of New Orleans, the area hardest hit by Hurricane Katrina in 2005, and declared that “never again will a disaster of this nature be handled in the terrible and disgraceful way that it was handled.’’

Mr. McCain, who was on the fourth day of a tour of America’s “forgotten places” to try to prove that he is a kinder, gentler Republican, ticked off a long list of mistakes: “There was unqualified people in charge, there was a total misreading of the dimensions of the disaster, there was a failure of communications.’’

Asked at an outdoor news conference if he traced the failure of leadership straight to the top, Mr. McCain, who has vowed to campaign with President Bush, said, emphatically, “yes.’’

Conspicuous by its absence was any like condemnation or criticism of the two local Donk officials at the time - New Orleans Mayor Ray "School Bus" Nagin and Louisiana Governor Kathleen "Babbling" Blanco - who had far more to do with the mishandling of the Katrina aftermath than the federal government did.  But that's to be expected, as everybody knows that the Sith do not attack each other.

Of course, the facts are that the federal portion of the Katrina response was handled no worse than in any prior natural disaster.  Neighboring Mississippi, to cite the most pertinent example, didn't experience the supposed travails of FEMA's "terrible and disgraceful mishandling" of the relief efforts.  Of course, the Magnolia State also had a competent Republican governor (former RNC Chairman Haley Barbour) who didn't waste his time bungling the job and then whinily blaming the Bush Administration for the "terrible and disgraceful" results.  It also didn't get Mississippi the tiniest fraction of the "terrible and disgraceful" press coverage Louisiana got.

But nothing - particularly left-wing urban legends - can stop or even slow down Darth Queeg when he goes on the warpath against what is allegedly his own party.  He even plumbed the depths of utterly empty symbolism:

Later, Mr. McCain told reporters on his campaign bus that if the disaster had happened on his watch, he would have landed his plane “at the nearest Air Force base and come over personally.” Mr. Bush first surveyed the damage when he flew over New Orleans in Air Force One when coming home from his Texas ranch two days after the hurricane, an act widely criticized.

And if the President had done as Maverick suggests, he'd have been widely criticized for rushing to the Big Soggy to grandstand and "politicize" the disaster.  So would a President McCain, for that matter, as long as he hides behind that phony "R" after his name.

Would Sailor taking the controls of Air Force One, landing at the nearest Air Force base and rushing to the scene, press corps in Clinton-like tow, have actually changed anything?  Nope.  Probably would have just gotten in the way of the first-responders' work.  If the Arizonan wants to truly get ahead of the curve in the next natural disaster, he should be promising to fly around in Air Force One twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, maintaining constant meteorological vigilence.  And when a hurricane is detected headed for American territory, he should pledge to seize the controls again, fly straight into the storm, and accelerate full-throttle against the hurricane's spin to dissipate it before it can make landfall.  Or, even better, he should propose a twelve-figure meteorological (and tectonic, and anti-comet/asteroid) Manhatten Project to develop weather-control technology so that no natural disaster can ever threaten us again.

Hey, I'm sure his "anti-pork" crusade can scrape up enough federal pocket change to pay for it, right?

But that wasn't the end of Senator McCain's fraticidal "bipartisanism," not by a long shot.  He issued the usual reaction to this North Carolina GOP ad:

Doesn't look or sound unfair or unreasonable to me.  One might wonder at the wisdom of Republicans wading into the Wright Stuff themselves, thus providing a unifying catalyst to the Dems, either locally or nationally, that could only benefit Barack Obama.  But these extremist associations of his get to the heart of his character as a candidate and what kind of president BO would be, and are entirely fair game.

But not according to False Messiah's "good, close, personal friend":

Presumptive Republican presidential nominee Senator John McCain, of Arizona, moved quickly on Wednesday to reject the ad. "I have been committed to running a respectful campaign based upon an honest debate about the great issues confronting America today.  I expect all state parties to do so as well.  The television advertisement you are planning to air degrades our civics and distracts us from the very real differences we have with the Democrats,"  said McCain in a letter to the North Carolina Republican Party Chair Linda Davis.

McCain demanded that Davis discontinue plans to run the ad: "It is imperative that you withdraw this offensive advertisement."

The North Carolina GOP has defiantly not complied.  Good for them.  At least they recognize an ass in pachyderm clothing when they see one.

J-Ger tries to dress up this perfidy as an appeal to "independents," which I don't buy for a moment because "independents" are, by and large, simply Democrats who are ashamed to disclose their affiliation, and will never flock to McCain in anything like the numbers he would need even if there were enough of them to offset his forfeiture of the GOP base.  He also suggests that McCain's REAL purpose in talking up the North Carolina ad was to give GodDamngate extra legs:

By criticizing the ad, McCain turned it into a national story, which means the ad is likely to be replayed on the cable networks and linked on YouTube and discussed on the talk shows and talk radio and written about in newspapers and magazines. This ad has 76,000 views on YouTube already, and it was posted online Tuesday. 

And McCain gets to take the high road, saying he doesn't want to see negative campaigning done on his behalf.

He might as well say, "I want to win this campaign because I have better policies, not because my opponent associates with domestic terrorists who placed a bomb in a women's bathroom in the Pentagon. I want to win this campaign because I have better ideas, not because my opponent (as Karl Rove put it) "attended a church and developed a close personal relationship with its preacher who says AIDS was created by our government as a genocidal tool to be used against people of color, who declared America's chickens came home to roost on 9/11, and wants God to damn America." I want to win because voters believe I can solve the country's problems, not because my opponent's wife says she hasn't been proud of this country for the past twenty-five years."

I suppose that's a plausible theory in the abstract.  I just don't believe that Darth Queeg is that clever.

But, to be fair, I guess you can't knock his results:

Q: Well, one of the things to which some Democrats point — the Clinton campaign has not said this publicly at least, but one certainly hears it in talking to supporters in more of a background way. Look at the racial polarization in the last several contests — Pennsylvania, Ohio, Mississippi — is that going to be a problem? Is race going to be a problem for Barack Obama in the general election?

Plouffe: We really don’t think so. I mean the vast, vast majority of voters who would not vote for Barack Obama in November based on race are probably firmly in John McCain’s camp already.

Ah, Bar-ROCK says Sailor has locked up the Klan vote.  And that wasn't any gaffe or "misstatement," either, but simply the latest bucket of vomit hosed in the Dark Lord's direction by the campaign he persists in treating with kid gloves while continuing to hurl bricks at his own president and party.

This is the reason why Mr. Plouffe's bottom line is spot on, other than the identity of the Donk nominee:

And I think if you look at the Democratic voters who are voting for Senator Clinton in some of these states, when you sort of look beneath it and you project how this is going to happen, Barack Obama is going to be the Democratic nominee. He is going to be articulating policies and ideas that they believe in. They won’t agree with John McCain on issues like the economy and health care. And so I think that we are going to get the vast, vast majority of Democratic voters.

Given that Republican voters have been functionally disenfranchised, Democrat voters are the only ones that matter in this cycle.  They're highly unlikely to defect to Benedict McCain when they've got their dream ticket to put together.

Is there a method to McCainiacal madness, or is the madness the method itself?

Yes, that's another rhetorical question.

UPDATE: The Los Angeles Times kisses Darth Queeg's ass - yeah, that'll rally the conservative base....