This is shaping up to be one Goddamned entertaining week. The President and Vice President both announced that they weren’t going to be speaking at the Republican National Convention because they wanted to be in New Orleans. Apparently nobody told George and Dick that, not only would the bars be closed, but the voodoo priests would be too far inland to provide them with fresh souls.
Whoops! Turns out they’re down there for the hurricane, to show America that Republicans are prepared, tough, and that they will not negotiate with weather. Which works out well for McCain, because it keeps them the fuck away from his convention. Both Bush and Cheney were gonna speak tonight, which would be about as well-advised a way to show a new era of politics for our children as bringing in John Wayne Gacy as a warmup act for Dora the Explorer On Ice.
The problem is, McCain is hunkered down there too, probably to offer his keen emergency management skills borne from his decades of experience being a Senator from a state where a weather emergency is when the air conditioner shits the bed.
The logic behind his being there is presumably to make him look like a prepared, concerned, Commander-In-Chief type, which looks good on paper… provided you ignore the facts that if he stands in a wind stronger than 30 miles-per-hour his hips will shatter like they were dipped in liquid nitrogen, and that when he hears hard rain on tin roofs he will probably think that Charlie’s firing on him again.
(Conversely, Obama’s just getting briefings on the storm by telephone. Which is smart, because based on what happened three years ago during Katrina, if Obama showed his face on the streets after the storm the New Orleans Police would probably shoot him as a looter. But I digress.)
The good news will be that, if McCain is in New Orleans for the convention, he won’t be sharing a nationally-televised stage with Sarah Palin and groping her again like he’s a raincoat and a late-night subway ride away from a morals conviction. Last weekend McCain told reporters that Palin was his “soul mate”, which was probably meant to summarize her politics but instead only gave me horrible mental images of McCain doing blow off her ass to fortify the Viagra he’s waiting to kick in.
It’s been a fun weekend watching the Republicans try to make a former beauty queen with less than two years of executive experience sound like Reagan With A Retarded Daughter. They’ve spent the weekend saying that she’s got more experience as an elected official than Obama, which is true… but only if you count Student Council Treaurer and the Bestest Daughter Ever straw vote of 1975.
And the cool thing is, one way or the other, they’re gonna have to put Palin in front of a microphone to prove that she’s valid Vice Presidential material and not Danielle “Tits” Quayle. Which should prove to be immensely entertaining, because she’s going to have to address the hurricane’s aftermath, and it’ll take a deft speechwriter to make someone whose idea of emergency preparedness is extra Vaseline for her teeth sound presidential.
So the GOP Convention should turn out to be a giggle-a-minute thrill ride, as McCain does his best to pretend he can part the flood waters even though he makes Moses look like a juvenile delinquent, and Republicans try to convince themselves that a loser beauty queen and failed sportscaster in the 829th largest media market in America is the right person to be a heartbeat away from assuming the presidency of a man so old that the number of heartbeats he has remaining could be tabulated on a Fisher Price My First Calculator.
So in short, get ready for the political equivalent of a Phillies game; there’ll be a lot of cheering by a bunch of die-hards trying to ignore the fact that their team is one more dropped ball away from mathematical elimination.
[tags]Republican National Convention, GOP, John McCain, Sarah Palin, George Bush, Dick Cheney, Hurricane Gustov, New Orleans, political humor, dark humor, satire[/tags]
