As though he cared - updated

Hunter writes of John McCain's tour of forgotten places and his spouting about never letting something like the government's neglect of New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina happen again.

On the day Katrina struck New Orleans, John McCain was meeting with President Bush on an Arizona tarmac in order to be presented with a cake; the occasion was his 69th birthday. In the next months, McCain used his position in the Senate to vote against Medicare relief and unemployment benefits for homeless New Orleans residents, and against investigations into what went wrong. But McCain understands the forgotten city, and McCain is alarmed by the inaction of senators such as himself, and McCain vows to investigate what went wrong so that it will not be repeated. You must believe all these things, because if you do not, you are calling into question the sincerity of a four day bus tour.

There was a time I thought John McCain had integrity and was one of the good guys among Republicans. That was a while ago.

UPDATE:
Jonathan Stein at Mother Jones writes of McCain's responses to Katrina:

That attitude was borne out in McCain's actions and votes. Forty Senators and 100 members of Congress visited New Orleans before he did; he finally got there in March 2006. He voted against establishing a Congressional commission to examine the Federal, State, and local responses to Katrina in med-September 2005. He repeated that vote in 2006. He voted against allowing up to 52 weeks of unemployment benefits to people affected by the hurricane, and in 2006 voted against appropriating $109 billion in supplemental emergency funding, including $28 billion for hurricane relief.

Shortly after the disaster in New Orleans, McCain did introduce a bill that sought to improve communications mechanisms for first-responders and authorities. The bill failed to go anywhere, and McCain later voted against other bills that had similar provisions.

h/t Truthout

This sort of all-empty-words-and-no-helpful-actions behavior is precisely what Barack Obama said ordinary folk were bitter about. Bitter? Damn skippy lots of Americans are bitter! Bitter about bullshit being shoveled our way by politicians while our quality of life degenerates and our security decreases.

Asshat.
--the BB