The Conservative Soldier

Here they come.

Hurricane Obama in Denver this week. Hurricane Gustav in the Gulf of Mexico next week.

The winds of blame are swirling, gaining force, creating the vortex of fear and resentment beloved by liberal politicians.

The question for John McCain and his millions of supporters: Which hurricane is more threatening?

And the bigger question for the Obama camp: How freely do we exploit hurricane fallout, human suffering, even death?

A hurricane named Gustav is charting its menacing course in the Caribbean. Experts believe it will roll into the vast Gulf and head toward the United States. With memories of Hurricane Katrina in 2005 quite fresh, federal government brass are descending on New Orleans even now, even though it is too early to know if New Orleans will be in Gustav’s path.

President Bush and his Homeland Security and FEMA heads know they were blamed for every misstep after Katrina, blamed for decades of neglect by state and city government leaders and their failure to upgrade the city’s infrastructure to make it ready for a major hurricane. And Bush was blamed for delays in the arrival of federal aid and relief coordination, even as New Orleans police and rescue departments choked under pressure, unprepared and, perhaps, unconcerned.

That terrible hurricane exactly three years ago this week peeled back layers of largely invisible poverty in New Orleans, revealing thousands of people living in dwellings that would barely have stood up to a routine severe weather event and certainly never had a chance to withstand Katrina’s wrath.

All of the devastation was laid at the feet of the Bush Administration. Bush doesn’t care about the poor people of New Orleans who have lost everything, the thinking went. To rational observers it was so absurd that we were left to wonder if these instant historians suspected Bush of ordering Katrina to the shores of Louisiana and Mississippi.

And now? Obama gets his coronation Thursday night in Denver, but the Republican National Committee and the McCain campaign already are in planning mode, playing out scenarios for next week under which the Republican Convention in Minneapolis-St. Paul would be impacted by Gustav. If the storm hits as scheduled, would Republicans gathered for their convention hundreds of miles to the north become (unjustly) ridiculed as “insulated, out-of-touch white folk”, partying away while citizens of New Orleans and other impoverished Gulf Coasters are enduring Hurricane Gustav?

And would Team Obama exploit this scenario? Of course. Count on it.

Hurricanes are among nature’s most feared weather events. They are unpredictable and unrelenting. But they can be avoided, and it is not up to the federal government, and certainly not up to the President of the United States, to force citizens to face up to the threat posed by these hurricanes (especially amid predictions of active hurricane seasons for years to come). Let us consider the facts:

- No one is forced to live in coastal regions of the country where hurricanes are most likely to arrive every few years or more.

- No one who stays in his home despite orders to evacuate as a hurricane approaches can complain if he loses everything in a matter of a few hours. Evacuees tends to find themselves uninjured with drinking water, food, clothing and at least one automobile still intact when they obey authorities.

- A lot of New Orleans residents insisted the city would never experience a catastrophic hurricane and, even as Katrina was roaring to life and growing by the minute, refused to budge.

But President Bush and his administration ultimately was blamed for everything that happened thereafter, not the governors of Louisiana and Mississippi, or the mayor of New Orleans, or the individuals who chose to ride it out.

The brilliant political columnist Victor Davis Hanson addressed a similar scenario back in February. We didn’t know about Gustav then, but we were already seeing the gathering storm of a weakening economy, mortgage foreclosures and rising energy prices. And the blame game had begun even as the clouds darkened on the horizon.

Obama and other liberals were then seizing the “gloom-and-doom” narrative that said “Americans are doing almost everything right, but still are not living as well as we deserve to be.” Hanson cited examples of the many bad things Obama wants voters to believe should have been stopped by Bush:

- The Home Mortgage Meltdown, which, Hanson writes, “had nothing to do with misguided attempts … to put first-time buyers in homes through zero-down payments, interest-only loans, and subprime but adjustable mortgage rates — as part of liberal efforts to increase home ownership rates.”

- Foreclosures. “There are apparently few Americans who unwisely borrowed against their homes a second and third time …”. Bush made them do it, apparently.

- Fuel and energy price hikes. Bush forced people to own “large gas-guzzlers (for everyday driving) and big homes” even as liberals maintained an aversion to “nuclear power plants, oil drilling off the coasts and in Alaska, and conservation of resources.”

The Obamaniacs preach that American can not afford another four years of Bush-like governance and, next week, with giddiness I am sure, they will denounce a Republican Party that dares to hold a convention as a hurricane approaches.

Who knows what actually will happen. Appearing on Fox News, political observer and campaign guru Dick Morris commented today that, right or wrong, McCain and his inner circle must begin monitoring The Weather Channel around the clock when arriving for the convention in Minneapolis. If there is a hurricane that slams the Gulf coast, Morris said, “McCain needs to get on a plane and go there.”

That may be a valid point. But before he does, I hope Sen. McCain also takes a moment to remind Republicans that the U.S. economy is starting to recover from its own hurricane, that GDP rose to 3.3% in the second quarter, blowing away estimates, and that average national gas prices fell 42 days in a row through Aug. 28.

There is a lot of blame swirling around. Might as well take a little credit, too.

I ate lunch today at my favorite sushi place. While I savored my selected delicacies, I was thinking about Beijing and the Olympic Games beginning there Friday night.

I know, I know. Sushi is of Japanese, not Chinese, origin. But anytime I am struggling with a pair of chopsticks I am reminded anew about our obsession with cultural sensitivity. I love sushi, but I know I would love it more with a knife and fork, and I am sure there are quite a few Hollywood liberals who’d argue that I would “offend” the Japanese by taming my sushi with blatantly Anglo-Saxon utensils.

I am going to make a prediction about the Beijing Games, even while extracting chopstick slivers from my tongue. I predict that we will observe a steady procession of American Olympic athletes, coaches and officials issuing apologies for misguided words and deeds that are obviously offensive to the warm and humanitarian people of China.

It has begun already. Apparently, the mainstream media intend to treat the Chinese like one billion Barack Obamas. Even the hint of criticism will be strictly off limits.

Just yesterday I had to send an email to a journalist friend scolding him for his characterization of four U.S. cyclists arriving at Beijing’s airport. Writing for NBCOlympics.com, he observed that by showing up in surgical or hygienic masks they were guilty of “one of the sorriest breaches of good manners any American Olympic athlete has displayed.” And, as we live in an era when Americans are increasingly embarrassed, if not downright apologetic, for being, well, American, my friend further ranted that our Olympians must be “sensitive always and in all ways to the ways in which Americans can be perceived overseas.”

To be sure, Americans have demonstrated poor judgment and behavior during the Games in recent years. I will grant that. In Seoul in 1988, there were the swimming Olympians who removed a lion’s head sculpture from a hotel lobby. In Nagano (Japan) in 1998, American ice hockey players trashed a few Olympic Village sleeping rooms on their way out of town.

“Duh, they’re hockey players,” didn’t seem an adequate explanation for the Japanese.

As there seems to be trouble in Olympic years ending in 8, perhaps we know why U.S. Olympic officials required every 2008 American qualifier to attend a series of cultural sensitivity seminars. It is not only criminal stuff like stealing or pillaging they’re worried about. Of equal concern is that one of our louts will inadvertently hug a Chinese person. They don’t hug. Which is sad, really, in a nation where so many downtrodden, neglected people appear to be in desperate need of one.

The Wall Street Journal reported that the seminar includes a warning to America’s finest athletic ambassadors to avoid “spearing” food items with chopsticks. Try to explain that to the javelin or fencing guys.

As for the mask-shrouded cyclists, their lungs were clear but U.S. Olympic officials later decided their consciences need a good scrubbing, too. They strong-armed the athletes into issuing a public apology for drawing attention to Beijing’s absolutely horrendous air quality. Some media members were particularly upset that the masks were worn indoors, inside the airport terminal. (Indoor air is pristine, apparently).

“We deeply regret the nature of our choices,” the apologetic statement read, in part.

I deeply regret that the U.S. Olympic Committee made the masks available to any and all team members who asked for them, then immediately made an example out of four who elected to wear them. I regret that somehow it has become culturally insensitive to hammer away at a country that has demonstrated blatant disregard for its air quality, that has no emissions standards, and that had the nerve to present itself as a worthy Olympic Games host in the first place.

Just wait until an American athlete takes a baiting media member’s sashimi morsel hook, line and sinker and goes off on the myriad human rights abuses that seem to be as much a part of China’s fabric as democracy is part of America’s.

The idiots in the U.S. House of Representatives believe American should apologize for the part of its past when citizens owned slaves. But we dare not so much as raise an eyebrow at a Chinese government that enslaves activitists by throwing them in prison and enslaves citizens (living far outside of the Olympics’ bright lights) by ensuring they endure unthinkable poverty.

Please, slap the hands of Olympians who go into a foreign country and mock the language, or the clothing, or the food, or who commit immature, even criminal acts. Send ‘em home. Call ‘em out.

But let’s not spend the next two weeks apologizing because someone wears a mask (Asians wear them quite frequently as a practical defense against smog and germs), or observes that, wow, your pollution really sucks, Mr. Hu.

It is not a question of if, but when, a well intentioned American kid fumbles a piece of fish on a minor chopstick infraction in the Olympic Village.

My advice: Ask for a fork and tell your Chinese hosts the apology is in the mail.