The current track places the storm dead on New Orleans. But this is many, many days in advance so you can't expect this to be accurate. But, this is worth keeping an eye on.
Speculation: RNC opens on September 1st. Gustav hits the Gulf Coast September 1st. RNC second and third day play out with the Republicans following tradition, which involves making stark and insensitive statements about people in need, landing bloody punches, or at least trying to, on their competition. As typically happens, the Republicans are seen as insensitive. This insensitivity is underscored by the choice of Tim "Fallen Bridge" Pawlenty as the Vice Presidential candidate.
By the third day of the convention/ third day of the Gustav Disaster, the analogies and parallels and metaphors linking Katrina to Gustav and Gustav to Katrina and Hurricanes to Global Warming and government ineffectiveness to Katrina and Bush to Katrina and so on and so forth saturate the airwaves.
Somewhere in Mississippi or Louisiana, a trailer park full of Katrina victims is hit with a flood caused by Gustav. One or two innocents die in the flood. The official government line: They were killed by a flood, not by the hurricane. They were killed by an accident, not because they still lived in a FEMA trailer.
By the fourth day of the RNC, half of the news coverage is on the RNC, the other half on Gustav. There are rumors of McCain having chest pains. Pawlenty gets mad at reporters and blows up at them. It is revealed that the company that built and placed the trailers in the flood zone is a subsidiary of Haliburton. Cheney, indifferent, brushes off reporter's questions.
...Then...
... Two Republican members of congress are arrested in the mens room of Fat Lorenzo's, a working class restaurant on the way to the airport, soliciting sex from a 16 year old illegal Mexican immigrant boy ...
By 11:39 PM EST, September 4th, the Republican Party, for all practical purposes, shuts down.
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That's a happy scenario, but I'm afraid it will go like this:
Monday: RNC Opens. Gustav hits New Orleans. Republicans make prayerful display of solidarity with people of NOLA. RNC adjourns and charters planes to NOLA.
Tuesday: Entire Republican Party is killed in stampede to get best positions during photo op at a refugee soup kitchen.
November: McCain/Pawlenty sweep 49 states with sympathy vote.
December: Supreme Court decides that since the House lacks a quorum to choose a new president that duty falls o the Vice President. Cheney appoints himself President for life.
January 20: During an unscheduled solar eclipse, 144,000 nice Unitarians vanish leaving even their clothes behind.
January 21: Cheney begin seven year reign of terror.
Gustav hits New Orleans. Levees fail, city floods, population is evacuated.
Bush declares a state of emergency, New Orleans and surrounding parishes (Louisiana has parishes, not counties) are named as Federal disaster areas. The Louisiana National Guard is mobilized and assigned to disaster relief.
McCain uses the opportunity to lambaste the Democratic administration of New Orleans and Louisiana. FEMA comes in for their share of condemnation. The Department of Justice is directed to begin a criminal investigation of state and local complicity in the disaster.
Bloggers start investigating the role of insurance companies, focusing on insurance company obfuscation and delays. The role of litigation attorneys is exposed, resulting in numerous suits for legal malpractice. A number of attorneys are charged with criminal fraud and obstruction of justice. Numerous law schools are prosecuted under one of a number of RICO acts as criminal enterprises.
Barack Obama and his campaign staff learn about the Internet.
Ever since Drudge wrote his article about Gustav maybe smacking New Orleans, the NHC forecasters have been making remarks like this:
Yes - everyone in New Orleans should be double-checking their hurricane preparedness list - and so should nearly everyone else on the gulf coast.
New Orleans is in real danger, but it's about 48 hours too early to be assuming a New Orleans landfall, as New Orleans is just the most likely spot along about 600 miles (or more) of coastline.
Landfall in Galveston, TX to add insult to injury, proceeding on NNW to Sugar Land, TX wherein a rain of locusts decimates the town in retaliation for Tom Delay (who, ironically, was an exterminator before becoming the third most despicable man in America.)
The storm proceeds up Hwy 6 to Bryan, TX, ruining Rush Week at Texas A&M, the most anti-intellectual state college in the nation (and, incidentally, the breeders of the first pumpkin able to walk itself to market) and raining toads on Don McLeroy, (State Board of Education, R-Crazytown), who, in a fit of joy (believing the toads to be a sign of imminent Rapture), accidentally drops a nitrous cylinder in his dentist's office, shearing off the valve. The rocketing gas cylinder snags the hapless YEC dentist and deposits him in a flaming mass on a freighter packed with ammonium nitrate fertilizer in the Texas City harbor. Local seismographers note a signal that looks suspiciously like the vocal signature of the phrase "Oh no, not again!" just before the harbor is vaporized in a fiery cataclysm.
Becoming bored, the storm proceeds to Dallas where it parks over Southern Methodist University where it rains itself out with the tears of the dead, dying, and mourning in a futile effort to convince the university to reject hosting the George W. Bush Presidential Museum.
And somewhere in Mexico, winter home of the monarch butterfly, a single insect beats its wings and thinks "Oh yeah? Well two can play at that game..." and another hurricane forms out in the Atlantic, aimed right at Texas.
(with apologies to the late Douglas Adams)
Correction: Louisiana has a Republican administration now.
Update: Gov. Jindan has activated the LA National Guard and has ordered them to prepare for Gustav's possible landing. If Gustav does land in LA expect people to praise the governor for his foresight. If Gustav does not land in LA expect people to condemn the governor for wasting resources.
I think you have it pretty head-on.
Well hopefully it just won't hit NO. Those levees aren't ready. Last report I saw said that they'd break in a cat 3, so I wouldn't want to chance a cat 2.
RNC will go like this: an endless stream of pious blather, denial, and self-congratulation. Republicans will eat it up with a spoon no matter how ludicrous. Presidential election will be very close, doing nothing to dispel the image of America as a country that wouldn't even notice if its pants were on fire.
decrepitoldfool,
In other words, the DNC with a different cast.