The Lessons of "Childgate" About Trump and His Supporters

Yesterday morning, former Republican congressman Joe Scarborough stated that Donald Trump is openly racist and by extension, so are his supporters.  Yahoo News provides excerpts of Scarborough's comments with which I am in full agreement:

“You’ve got Charlottesville, where Donald Trump of course defended white supremacists with moral equivalency,” Scarborough said. “Even this year, Donald Trump calling Hispanics ‘breeders.’ Just last week, saying that immigrants coming across the border were, quote, ‘infesting America,’ and no, he wasn’t talking about gang members.”

“[Trump supporters] cannot say, ’Oh, I’m just supporting him because he’s giving them hell in Washington, D.C.,” Scarborough said. “No, he’s been openly racist, just like we said back in December of 2015, openly racist. If you support him, then you’re supporting that, and you are that. It’s that simple. That’s what we’ve come to now.”

In addition to Trump himself and his sycophants, what I find most abhorrent is the attitude of Trump's supporters - some 55% of Republicans per one poll -  who fully support tearing children from their parents.  In the minds of these people, many of whom will part their wide asses in church pews tomorrow morning - brown skin somehow renders one less than human and worthy of horrors they would never want visited on their own children or grandchildren.  Their moral bankruptcy is complete and they need to be shunned and excluded in every way possible by decent moral Americans.  Most upsetting is the reality that many of the immigrant children ripped from their parents may never see their parents again given the incompetence of Trump's stooges and henchmen.  A column in the New York Times looks at this horrible reality.  Here are excerpts:

In the early days of Donald Trump’s regime, Benjamin Wittes, editor of the Lawfare blog, coined an oft-repeated phrase about the president’s first, slapdash Muslim ban: “malevolence tempered by incompetence.” It’s a useful formulation; Trump’s fascist instincts would be much more dangerous if he had the discipline to pursue them systematically instead of spasmodically.

Yet sometimes Trump’s incompetence and malevolence are not at cross-purposes; instead, there’s a multiplier effect. This was true of the White House’s catastrophically inadequate response to Hurricane Maria in Puerto Rico. And it’s true of the cavalier way the administration took thousands of children from migrant parents with no process in place to reunite them.

On Wednesday, amid a mounting national outcry, Trump signed an executive order purporting to end his administration’s own family separation policy. It’s not clear how lasting the order’s impact will be. Trump wants to replace family separation with indefinite mass family detention, which would run afoul of legal precedent. (On Thursday afternoon, The New York Times reported that the Pentagon was assessing how and where to hold as many as 20,000 migrant children on military bases.) Trump’s executive order said nothing about reuniting children and parents who’ve already been separated. Messages from government agencies have been contradictory. There’s still no clear process for many of these parents to even find out where their kids are, never mind get them back. Even experts are having trouble figuring out what the Trump administration has done with some of these kids. The Times described consular officials from Central America in “crisis mode” as they search for “children as young as 9 months old who did not appear to have been carefully tracked by the federal authorities.” Writing in The Post, an El Paso public defender named Erik Hanshew quoted an incredulous judge: “If someone at the jail takes your wallet, they give you a receipt. They take your kids, and you get nothing? Not even a slip of paper?” Unlike most emergencies, family separation was deliberately engineered by the government, so planning for the aftermath should have been easier. Yet somehow no one appears to have thought to create a database to help parents and children locate each other.

Part of the reason for this failure could be Trump’s indifference to expertise. He appointed E. Scott Lloyd, an anti-abortion activist, to head the Office of Refugee Resettlement, the agency charged with caring for children after they’re separated from their parents. . . . Nothing in his background indicates an ability to handle the sort of complex logistical and humanitarian challenge he’s now presented with.

On Friday, the A.C.L.U., which has sued to stop family separations, is meeting with a judge in the case to discuss the implications of Trump’s executive order. A.C.L.U. lawyer Lee Gelernt told me they planned to ask for an injunction ordering immediate family reunification. “The government’s efforts are ridiculous,” he said.

When it comes to North Korea, it’s in most of our interests to play along with Trump’s Potemkin diplomacy, since as long as Trump thinks he’s solved a global problem, he won’t want to start a nuclear war. But no one should pretend that the family separation disaster is even close to being resolved until every family Trump thoughtlessly tore apart is back together.

On Thursday, the first lady, Melania Trump, visited a facility housing migrant children near the border. Inexplicably, as she boarded her flight to Texas, she wore a jacket that said on the back, in large white letters, “I Really Don’t Care. Do U?” It’s hard to tell whether incompetence or malevolence was behind her choice, but we should take her sartorial taunt as a challenge. Nationwide demonstrations against the president’s family separation policy are planned for June 30. Trump’s executive order hasn’t made them any less necessary.

Never in my lifetime have I been so ashamed to be an American. Trump and his supporters must be defeated.  All of us must act to make this happen.

The Collapse of Trumpcare and the GOP's Inability to Govern

Like it or not, the Republican Party has become a sectarian, racist and ideologically driven political party.   The result is that ideology and bigotry trump all else and the practical realities of governing are either ignored or behind the comprehension of the zealots who now comprise the party base and to whom GOP elected officials have prostituted themselves. Trumpcare is a perfect example.  The real goal is massive tax cuts for the wealthy and the supposed removal of government from the healthcare industry, the later, of course, being utterly impossible, especially when one considers how poorly the private sector market function before the passage of the Affordable Health Care Act.  Add to this the public's massive opposition to the Republican "repeal and replace" bills to date and Trumpcare's collapse yesterday should have been foreseen by anyone not drinking the Republican Kool-Aid (thankfully 4 Republican senators seemingly refused to drink when the Kool-Aid was passed to them).   A piece in New York Magazine looks at the GOP's inability to govern when ideology is forced to meet reality.  Here are article highlights:

In 2009, David Frum, the former Bush administration speechwriter whose ideological apostasy was in its formative stages, met with conservative intellectuals to discuss the policy response to the great recession. Faced with evidence that only massive government action — a financial rescue coupled with fiscal stimulus — could have prevented a complete economic meltdown, one conservative made a startling confession: “Maybe it was a good thing we weren’t in power then — because our principles don’t allow us to respond to a crisis like this.”

The financial crisis is hardly the only issue for which conservative principles turn out to be incompatible with the practical demands of governance. (Climate change leaps to mind.) The collapse of the Republican plan to repeal and replace Obamacare is an especially vivid demonstration of the broader problem. The cohesion Republicans possessed in opposition disintegrated once they had power, because their ideology left them unable to pass legislation that was not cruel, horrific, and repugnant to their own constituents.

Donald Trump promised during the campaign that he would quickly and easily replace Obamacare with an alternative everybody would love.

One might dismiss this kind of rhetoric as a typical Trumpian boast. But the candidate was merely translating into the vernacular the somewhat more carefully hedged promises his party had made for years into terms in which they were meant to be understood. Paul Ryan’s “A Better Way” road map offered what it called “a step-by-step plan to give every American access to quality, affordable health care. … more choices and lower costs.”

In truth, it was never possible to reconcile public standards for a humane health-care system with conservative ideology. In a pure market system, access to medical care will be unaffordable for a huge share of the public. Giving them access to quality care means mobilizing government power to redistribute resources, either through direct tax and transfers or through regulations that raise costs for the healthy and lower them for the sick. Obamacare uses both methods, and both are utterly repugnant and unacceptable to movement conservatives. That commitment to abstract anti-government dogma, without any concern for the practical impact, is the quality that makes the Republican Party unlike right-of-center governing parties in any other democracy. In no other country would a conservative party develop a plan for health care that every major industry stakeholder calls completely unworkable.

The Trump administration might lash out at Obamacare by continuing to sabotage its functioning markets. They will find, however, that sabotaging the insurance exchanges will create millions of victims right away, as opposed to the luxury of delaying the pain until after the elections. The power to destroy remains within the Republican Party’s capacity. The power to translate its ideological principles into practical government is utterly beyond its reach.

The first step in the GOP's move to insanity was when the Christofascists hijacked the party base.  Now, the entire party has been subsumed to ignoring objective reality just as the Christofascists reject anything or anyone that challenges their myth and legend based world view.  Myths and legends may be fine and good in literature or in the bubble of a fundamentalist congregation, but objective facts and science quickly undercut the unsupportable fantasy world that they comprise.  So too with the GOP's unworkable ideology. 

Why the Republican Party Cannot Govern

The best news at the end of the first 100 days of the ill begotten regime of Der Trumpenführer is that other than some admittedly horrible executive orders and the appointment of Neil Gorsuch to the Supreme Court, the Republicans in Washington, DC, have accomplished almost nothing.  Rather than proving himself to be another Hitler - he has too little self-discipline or core ideology - Trump has shown himself instead to be a version of Sargent Schultz from the old Hogan's Heroes TV show. (he even has a similar girth).  All of which is good news for America given that so much of what the Trump/GOP agenda has to offer is toxic to all but the extremely wealthy or large corporations.   Yes, there remain plenty of reasons to be fearful of what the narcissist-in-chief might do, but with luck his regime will remain a do nothing one and that his supporter's sole source of glee will be limited to no longer a black man in the White House.  A column in the Washington Post by a conservative columnist looks at the GOP dysfunction and incompetence at governing.  Here are excerpts: 

The markets are waking up to the reality that President Trump is not going to accomplish much of anything, as the Wall Street Journal reports:

Markets are signaling caution after investors greeted President Donald Trump’s election with enthusiasm.

Bets on higher economic growth, inflation and interest rates—which became known as the “reflation trade”—have eased since the election. The yield on the 10-year Treasury note is lower than it was when Mr. Trump took office, including a decline Wednesday after the White House unveiled its tax proposal. 

If one had any doubt, this week’s events — a half-baked tax proposal that would not pass one let alone two houses, another failed effort at Trumpcare, White House bluffs and retreats on the budget — should have disabused observers of the notion that Trump’s agenda would sail through Congress.

The Trumpcare effort was the quintessential “rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic.” For every Freedom Caucus member who figured he’d jump on the bandwagon (the opt-out for states who could choose to do away with the list of essential benefits), there was a moderate who jumped off. What did Ryan and the rest expect would happen when they made a bad bill even less attractive to the great majority of Americans?

Trump cannot manage to devise attractive legislation or get down in the weeds of negotiation, while House Speaker Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) seems willing to accommodate whatever group is currently rocking the boat, regardless of the likelihood of success. Neither Ryan nor Trump can lead a successful legislative effort. As a result, members of Congress figure there is little reason to stick their necks out for either one. 

To a large degree, the GOP’s angst is to the country’s benefit. The national and world economies are slowly recovering from the 2008 financial meltdown. Unemployment is way down in the United States. If “do no harm” (or, as President Barack Obama would say, “Don’t do stupid stuff”) is the watchword, then gridlock and inaction may not be the worst thing. Not exiting from NAFTA, not pulling the rug out from millions of people who got coverage under Obamacare and not building a wall or harassing cities (for refusing to do the feds’ work on immigration enforcement) are certainly preferable to Trump “succeeding” on these issues. A tax plan that exacerbates the gap between rich and poor and starves the federal government of revenue so that it cannot make worthwhile investments in worker training, education, science and infrastructure would arguably be worse than the current situation. If they fail on the big, ambitious items, then small improvements in Obamacare or the tax code may be possible.

[T]his president and this Congress have not a clue how to proceed. They would potentially do much more harm than good. They are prisoners of extreme ideology, unrealistic expectations and their own incompetence.

Perhaps under another president, the center-right and center-left can make progress on key issues. For the remainder of Trump’s term, however, the best-case scenario would be no new wars or new nuclear powers and the status quo at home.

Will the Government Shut Down Over Border Wall Funding?

Donald Trump is sticking with his "build the wall" con which his ignorant voters fell for during the election.  Missing, of course, from the carnival barker's calls is any serious recognition of (i) the true cost, or (ii) just how long any construction would take given the need to first go through lengthy and time consuming condemnation proceeds to acquire the needed land in many border areas. Seemingly, even some Republican members of Congress recognize the impracticality, true cost and time line of Der Trumpenführer's wall along the Mexico border even if his cretinous supporters do not.  Now, signs are that a federal government shut down may occur if Trump continues to demand funding for his exercise in placating racists.  A piece in the Washington Post looks at the possible show down.  Here are highlights (don't believe Trump's 3.5 year construction schedule since condemnation cases, if appealed, alone could take longer):

President Trump and White House officials pressed congressional Republicans on Sunday to use the looming threat of a government shutdown to win funding for a wall along the border between the United States and Mexico, a top priority for the administration as it nears the symbolic 100-day mark.

Trump wants funding to be included in a spending measure that would keep the government open past April 28, a determined effort that has prompted a possible standoff with lawmakers in both parties, who hope to avert a federal closure next weekend.

Trump’s push for fast action on his pledge to build the border wall is part of a mounting and, at times, tense scramble inside the administration to kick-start the president’s agenda, even if it risks dire political consequences.

White House Chief of Staff Reince Priebus said in an interview Sunday with The Washington Post that the president and his advisers remain “strong” in their commitment to securing funding for border security and a wall.

“This is what the president ran on,” Priebus said. “We want to get to a place this week where ­border-security money is being directed to the Department of Homeland Security so that we can begin surveillance and preliminary work, and then we will keep working on getting DHS what it needs for the structure.”

The Senate returns Monday night, and the House returns Tuesday from a two-week recess, leaving just three days when both chambers will be in session to wrangle out a funding agreement. Negotiators worked throughout the break, but thus far a deal has not been struck.

The wall, which experts say would cost $21.6 billion and take 3½ years to construct, has emerged as a crucial sticking point for the White House, with the president insisting privately and publicly that progress toward its funding and eventual construction must be showcased this week.

It remained unclear Sunday whether moderates within the GOP could persuade the White House to avoid a shutdown. Democrats have insisted that they will not vote for any spending bill that gives the White House money or flexibility to begin construction of a border barrier. They believe that the GOP will have to either abandon Trump’s demand or assume political responsibility if a shutdown occurs.

“The burden to keep it open is on the Republicans,” House ­Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) said Sunday on NBC’s “Meet the Press.” “Building a wall is not an answer.

The tweets did little to assuage concerns created earlier in the day when White House budget director Mick Mulvaney suggested that Trump might not sign a spending bill that does not meet his demands.

Democrats believe that voters will blame Trump for a shutdown, particularly if congressional leaders omit wall funding from a spending deal. Democrats and GOP leaders appeared to be nearing a spending agreement last week before Trump ramped up his demands.

Democrats and Republicans maintained common ground. One clear area of agreement was not to include border funding in the stopgap budget. Democrats agreed to include other border-security measures, including money for new drones to patrol the border, but it was agreed that the wall itself should be debated separately, after the government is kept open.

Mulvaney’s hard-line stance is also odds with a White House faction convinced that a government shutdown would be cataclysmic for an administration already struggling to prove its ability to govern, according to GOP aides in the White House and Congress who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss the ongoing talks.

Republican leaders have signaled that they will concentrate this week on keeping the government open, even if that means ignoring White House calls for action on other major priorities, such as rewriting the tax code and overhauling the ACA.

If federal workers end up staying home next week, the blame will be on Trump and the GOP.  The GOP controls all branches of the federal government and still cannot get anything done.  Mexico may be laughing loudly this time next week. 

Hillary Clinton Outlines How She Will Fight Trump

With Donald Trump increasingly looking as if he will be the Republican Party nominee, Hillary Clinton took the time last night after her wins in five primary states to give a taste of how she intends to counter Trumps policy free, demagogic campaign.  A column in the Washington Post contains a summary.  Here are highlights:

WEST PALM BEACH, FLA.  . . .  Clinton delivered the speech she has wanted to give for weeks, debuting the case she will make to the country between now and November. And it is a pretty good one.

After Tuesday night, it is no longer presumptuous for Clinton to begin her great pivot to the general election. She trounced Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) in Florida, North Carolina and Ohio, and she essentially fought him to a draw in Illinois and Missouri. She added to her delegate lead, and she quieted concerns that she cannot win in the industrial Midwest. 

she introduced her general election pitch, which stressed experience and seriousness. “The next president will walk into the Oval Office next January, sit down in that desk, and start making decisions that will affect the lives and the livelihoods of everyone in this country, indeed everyone on this planet,” she said, before methodically listing off the “three big tests” the next president will face and arguing that GOP front-runner Donald Trump fails each of them.

“First,” she said, “can you make positive differences in people’s lives?” She mentioned a series of policies she would like to pursue — lowering student debt, providing affordable child care, investing in infrastructure. One could object to one proposal or the other — cutting student loan interest rates for everyone, for example, instead of just for those who need it. But she brought the speech back to her larger point about political responsibility. “Every candidate makes promises like this. But every candidate owes it to you to be clear and direct about what our plans will cost and how we’re going to make them work,” she said, establishing a standard that she has satisfied more than any other presidential candidate this year. 

The next test, Clinton explained, is “can you keep us safe?” “Our commander in chief has to be able to defend our country, not embarrass it,” she said. “When we hear a candidate for president call for rounding up 12 million immigrants, banning all Muslims from entering the United States, when he embraces torture, that doesn’t make him strong, it makes him wrong.” Clinton nailed Trump for being reckless.

Clinton’s third and final test is the most pointedly anti-Trump: “Can you bring our country together again?” She condemned Trump’s “bluster and bigotry,” saying that “to be great, we can’t be small,” she said. “We can’t lose what made America great in the first place.” Once again, she contrasted Trump’s rhetoric with her experience. “Running for president is hard, but being president is harder,” she said. “No one person can succeed in the job without seeking and finding common ground.” Clinton has a record of working with Republicans; like her foreign policy point, she should develop this one to show off her strengths as much as highlight Trump’s weaknesses.

Clinton also ignored warnings that she has wandered too far from the center on immigration, speaking near the end of her speech about “a day when deportations end and families are reunited.” This is probably a sign she believes that locking up the Latino vote is more important in the general election than trying to soothe concerns about illegal immigration among other voters that Democrats may have traditionally attempted to court. It will be interesting to see how this plays out.

Tuesday night’s address was much cleaner than her first few drafts. Among other things, she wisely removed this meh line: “America never stopped being great; we need to make America whole.” She also delivered her speech with the conviction she sometimes lacks.

Stressing experience may be a questionable strategy in an anti-establishment election year. But her experience is Clinton’s greatest strength. She must show that she is the competent one and that Trump, if he claims the GOP nomination, simply is not.

The Iran Letter and the GOP's Inability to Govern

If one has watched the transformation of the Republican Party from a political party where a decent, moral person who values knowledge, logic and contending with objective reality could feel at home to today's insane asylum controlled by extremists and fanatics, two trends are easily seen.  The first is the rise of the Christofascists and all the poison that has brought.  The second is the change in focus of GOP elected officials from actually looking out for the best interests of America and seeking to govern to a place where the sole focus is on appealing to the hate, bigotry and delusions of the party base.  There is no long term plan and no vision of governing.  It's all about self-prostitution to religious whack jobs and racists with a strong dash of pandering to the wealthy.  A piece in the Washington Post by a conservative columnist laments the GOP's growing unfitness to govern.  Here are excerpts:

The true scandal of the Tom Cotton letter to Iranian leaders is the manner in which the Republican Senate apparently conducts its affairs. 

The document was crafted by a senator with two months of experience under his belt. It was signed by some members rushing off the Senate floor to catch airplanes, often with little close analysis. Many of the 47 signatories reasoned that Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell’s endorsement was vetting enough. There was no caucus-wide debate about strategy; no consultation with Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chairman Bob Corker (R-Tenn.), who has studiously followed the nuclear talks (and who refused to sign).

This was a foreign policy maneuver, in the middle of a high-stakes negotiation, with all the gravity and deliberation of a blog posting. In timing, tone and substance, it raises questions about the Republican majority’s capacity to govern. 

The exact shape of a possible Iran deal remains unknown. I’m on record predicting that it may be a bad one — a very unlikely throw of the dice that a terror-sponsoring, clerical regime will become a minimally responsible regional power.

But the half-baked Cotton letter was a poor instrument to express concern. First, the bleedingly obvious: If Republican senators want to make the point that an Iran deal requires a treaty, they should make that case to the American people, not to the Iranians. Congress simply has no business conducting foreign policy with a foreign government, especially an adversarial one. Every Republican who pictures his or her feet up on the Resolute Desk should fear this precedent.

[T]he main result is not a weakened presidency but a weakened legislature. Corker has been toiling with the ranking Democrat on the Foreign Relations Committee, Sen. Robert Menendez (N.J.), to craft legislation that would require Senate approval of an Iran deal. Before the Cotton letter, Corker was two votes away from a veto-proof, bipartisan majority. Now Obama and Minority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) are using the letter to argue that Republicans are engaged only in partisan games. 

A final objection to the Cotton letter concerns not institutional positioning but grand strategy. The alternative to a bad nuclear deal is not war; it is strong sanctions and covert actions to limit Iranian capacities until the regime falls (as it came close to doing in 2009) or demonstrates behavior change in a variety of areas. But this approach depends on the tightening of sanctions in cooperation with Europe, as well as Russia and China. And this effort can be held together only by the impression that the United States has negotiated with Iran in good faith.

The Cotton letter creates the impression that Senate Republicans are rooting for negotiations to fail — which would complicate our attempt to maintain strong sanctions if negotiations end up failing. 

[J]ustifying a bad idea by recounting a history of bad ideas is a particularly bad way to conduct foreign policy. It is the crutch of a partisan, not the argument of a statesman. This is presumably the reason we have a Senate, not only a House. A six-year term should ensure an extra 30 minutes to read a document and think through its implications.

What the Iraq War Revealed About the GOP

Let's be clear from the get go: In the view of this blog, the Iraq War was an unmitigated disaster that was launched based on lies and orchestrated by hubris filled cretins in the While House and Blair House.  Indeed, it demonstrated that no lessons had been learned from the Vietnam debacle and it may become a case study on how not to start or run a war.   It also showed the lie of the Republican Party's claim of "supporting our troops."  One doesn't truly support our troops when they send them into harms way on a fool's errand that is based on a lie and improperly equipped.  A piece in the Washington Post revisits the disaster launched by the Bush/Cheney regime that went on to involve war crimes, torture, waste, corruption and utter incompetence.  Here are some article excerpts:

Beyond the thousands of casualties incurred, the millions of troops and civilians deployed, and the trillions of dollars committed, the most enduring legacy of the Iraq war will be the political movements it triggered in this country: It shattered Republicans’ monopoly on national security and eroded service members’ allegiance to the GOP.

The Republicans’ mismanagement of the war allowed Democrats to reclaim an issue lost to them since the Truman administration. Suddenly, the GOP wasn’t viewed as unquestionably strong on national security. It’s a shift that, since 2006, has profoundly affected elections and arguably contributed more than any other factor — save the economy — to Barack Obama’s 2008 victory.

We now know that Iraq had no weapons of mass destruction on March 19, 2003, when U.S. troops invaded. This false casus belli alone would have been enough to tarnish the Republican brand. However, the Bush administration compounded that error with its failure to admit the existence of the insurgency, let alone plan for it, and its failure to provide adequate resources — until the troop surge of January 2007.

Senior administration officials made matters worse with their arrogant statements about the war and the troops’ plight .  .  .  .  To those serving in Iraq at the time or preparing to go, like I was, these statements suggested that our Republican leaders cared little about the people they were sending into harm’s way.

In addition to tarnishing Republicans’ reputation on defense, the Iraq war caused divisions that still plague the GOP. Beginning in 2002 and 2003, fissures grew between the neoconservative champions of the war, such as Wolfowitz and Richard Perle, and the Republican foreign policy establishment, represented by men such as Brent Scowcroft, Robert Gates and Colin Powell, who sharply criticized the Bush administration’s initiation and handling of the war.

More than any other issue, Obama’s opposition to the Iraq war helped him unite the Democratic base and win the nomination in 2008. The conflict also gave Democrats a chance to find their voice on national security: They fused criticism of the war’s management and its cost to American interests abroad with support for veterans and military personnel at home.

Within the military, the Iraq war also caused a political realignment.  .  .  .  By 2008, 47 percent of troops told Military Times that they tilted conservative, and 50 percent reported a GOP affiliation. In 2012, roughly the same percentage described themselves as conservative, but only 44 percent considered themselves Republicans.  These shifts are slight, but they suggest that while many military personnel still hold conservative views, they are less likely to be Republican than before the Iraq war.

Other factors have played a role, too. Today’s active and reserve force is more racially diverse and includes more women than at any time in its history. The force is also younger and more educated than the population as a whole, which explains why Democrats do better among younger veterans than the overall veteran population (the median age of U.S. veterans is about 62).

The GOP Fears the Ghost of Katrina

As the delusional and out of touch Republicans begin their coven in Tampa, one ghost is hanging over the convention: the prospect of Hurricane Issac hitting New Orleans just as the show comes to its crescendo.  Equally terrifying is the prospect that the Obama administration's response to wherever the storm hits will further under score the GOP incompetence that followed Hurricane Katrina almost exactly 7 years ago.  Politico has this on the ghost's specter:

Republicans have begun to whisper a grim word that sums up all their fears about the 2012 party gathering: Katrina.

No longer is GOP fretting focused on the prospect of Tropical Storm Isaac striking Tampa and blowing up party’s plans to crown Mitt Romney as its nominee. There’s still the possibility of logistical disruptions, but an epic meteorological mess doesn’t appear to be in the offing here.

Instead, party officials and convention planners are increasingly anxious about a different and possibly more damaging scenario: a split-screen broadcast of Republicans partying in Tampa alongside images of serious storm damage in states such as Louisiana and Mississippi.

Some Republicans here worry the juxtaposition of events could revive memories of the disastrous 2005 storms — Hurricanes Katrina and Rita — and the government’s terrible handling of them.

Public outrage over the George W. Bush administration’s response to those catastrophes — Katrina especially — shadowed the president and the GOP for years. For Republicans, Katrina is their version of the Carter administration’s failed Iranian hostage rescue in 1980 — an enduring symbol of collective incompetence, a political wound that will not heal.

What one hopes will come out of the storm coverage over the next few days is the fact that among the many cuts sought under the Romney-Ryan budget is emergency response agencies that are needed in precisely this type of situation.  The rich would benefit while others might be left literally to drown.  Such are the GOP's "values" nowadays.