Doom and Desperation

©04 the media desk
http://themediadesk.com

        Sitting back and watching this campaign has become almost too painfully hilarious to endure.

        Sitting back and watching the weather people dote on Hurricane Ivan coming ashore in Florida was like watching the Marx Brothers.

        The entrenched media's love affair with the Democrats, and more correctly, the Clinton Democrats is imploding around them. CBS and the USA Today have hung themselves on their own petard. Kerry has hamstrung himself on his own lies and inconsistencies. Bill simply backfired. Teddy Kennedy has demonstrated he is now completely irrelevant. And the DNC got caught ripping off NBC.
        You gotta love it.

        The Weather Channel and others were so intent on Ivan blowing across Florida they ignored the rest of the Gulf Coast until it was ridiculously obvious Ivan wanted to see LA (that's Lower Alabama for the rest of the country).
        They had been saying, predicting, and sometimes SEEING Ivan turn to the north east toward Florida even as the hurricane stayed on a more or less northwest course for over a week. They had promised that the 'Dry Air over the Gulf' would weaken it. And so on.
        The experts forgot to tell Ivan.
        You've just gotta love it.

        OK. Bush is NOT really a dynamic individual. He does come off as maybe a few coins short of a dollar. It's obvious somewhere along the first campaign that he had promised Daddy Bush that he'd finish the job in Iraq and as soon as the fires at the WTC were out he knew that was the excuse he needed to go after Saddam, whether or not there were nuclear weapons in the desert, Hussein was done.
        But the Presidency is a powerful instrument. The Bully Pulpit makes the incumbency something hard to beat. Unless you're running not to win, like Jimmy Carter did with his Rose Garden campaign. Or say something that's patently stupid and then have it endlessly played back four years later, later, like Bush 41 did 'Read My Lips'.
        Of course it also helps that the incumbent's major opposition is a blithering idiot who insists on wearing hideous pink ties and jabbering about nonsense that doesn't even make sense to his own supporters. All you have to do is look back through Kerry's voting record and position papers and public statements to find him both agreeing and disagreeing with almost anything under the sun. You name it, the Kyoto treaty, Iraq, guns, SUVs whatever. Kerry will have had multiple positions, in some cases, within days of each other.
        It could be that W needs nothing more to win the election than John Kerry to keep campaigning.

        The Weather Channels absolute obsession with Florida is a little harder to understand.
        Ivan was in the process of running Mobile through a car wash and then blow drying it and they were still running footage of some talker on the beach in Panama City, Florida with surfers behind them riding the high waves.
        Of six meteorologists running online journals on the storm on weather.com, four were in Florida.
        The best part of the whole thing was how the PhDs and Tropical Weather Experts had been all but swearing an oath that Ivan would change course and hit Florida since it had been on its Caribbean cruise more than a week before it ended up in Alabama. Some went so far as to say it could follow Charley through the Sunshine State and listed the dire consequences from it. They were totally fixated on Florida even after it became obvious the panhandle would only get a glancing blow. Meanwhile, back in the real world, the storm continued moving North by West and North North-West day after day until within hours of landfall when it did turn ever so slightly to the right.
        Of course the damage Ivan did to Florida is terrible, Don't Get All Sideways Here. Besides high winds and storm surge, Ivan stirred up tornadoes all over the place down there, one was reported as having tried to check into the hospital in Pensacola doing many bad things in the process. Many people were hurt and at least a couple killed. It was bad, it could have been much worse. But IF you believed the Weather Channel, the rest of the Gulf was in for a bit of a do, but nothing worth covering since Florida was going to take it on the chin yet again.
        But. Maybe humans don't know everything about nature after all.
        It would seem that given the best predictions of every expert and computer weather model going, Tropical Storms will do exactly what they damn well please.

        It would also seem that given the best predictions of every expert and election trend model going that the American Voter will do exactly what they damn well please too.

        John Kerry's wife tied the two together nicely, talking about how hurricane victims in the Caribbean could go naked because water and electric generators were more important than clothes, and some relief drive somewhere had been collecting too much clothing for them.
        W need do nothing else to win the election than let Mr and Mrs Kerry keep campaigning.

        Now as for the title of this article. Well, the Desk is sure you can figure it out.

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