Apropos my post from yesterday about the possibility that the GOP will postpone their convention due to the politics involved with Hurricane Gustav. Michael Moore showed us once again how the left has hijacked a natural disaster and turned it into a political football.

Appearing on Keith Olbermann's wretched show, the first word's out of Moore's mouth after Olbermann asked him about the potential postponement of the RNC were "Gustav is proof there is a God in heaven." (Video link here.)

Moore's lighthearted desire to see destruction of property (he says he hopes no one gets hurt) not to mention the tragedy of people losing everything they have while turning a natural disaster into fodder for political war  is, as I mentioned in my post yesterday, now part of the Democratic playbook (no doubt to be shelved by the left once Obama takes office). Turning disaster into a political advantage is one of the more perplexing things that have have taken place over the last 8 years - so far beyond the way politics used to be practiced that it bears scrutinty.

Politics is a very tough game. I will be the first to say if you can't stand the gaff, get out of the wind. But even at its most rank and partisan, politics used to have a pretty well established set of rules - unwritten to be sure but rules that both sides had tacitly agreed to play by.

You didn't go after your opponents family. You didn't charge infidelity unless you had the photos to prove it. And you didn't make hay out of natural disasters.

All that is by the wayside now - the fault of both sides whose virulent partisanship has led to the breakdown of most of these unwritten rules of political combat.

And it used to be that the press were the arbiters of how the game was played. Now, they join right in and openly take sides, further deepening the crisis we find ourselves in. The unbelievable performance of the national press during the first few days after Katrina made landfall was shocking to old timers like me. Fueled partly by their anger at the immense suffering of ordinary citizens (the same suffering they would have seen if they had been present in the aftermath of Hurricane Andrew during the Clinton Administration), the press  nevertheless crossed the line of reportage and became the voice of people who wondered why the "government" wasn't doing anything.

It will do no good to rehash the response of various government agencies following Katrina since the narrative has been set in stone and any facts that contradict the meme that the Bush Administration was entirely to blame of New Orleans drowning are simply ignored. But the point is that even before the hurricane winds had died down in the city, left wing blogs were screaming about racism, about a lack of government response, about people dying in shootouts at the Superdome, about babies being raped - the whole false narrative that they successfully pushed into the mainstream media to destroy the Bush presidency.

The fact that Katrina was a natural disaster never played into the idea that it was the Bush Administration that caused it. And now, for the foreseeable future, every single major natural tragedy - be it tornadoes, hurricanes, earthquakes, or flooding - will be politicized to the hilt with the federal response going under the microscope and federal officials held accountable for mother nature's fury.

It's not enough that government should work to alleviate suffering. Now the government must be seen as feeling the pain of the victims. Unless the president goes on TV and emotes, he is not doing his job as national weeper in chief and leaves him open to charges that he doesn't care or that he hates black people.

If this is the way the left wants to play it, they are going to get it back double if Obama is elected. Even the press will probably feel guilty enough that they would see it as necessary to "balance the scales" and go after an Obama administration for falling down on the job when natural disaster strikes.

Meanwhile, people will continue to die, property will still be destroyed, and suffering will always be the case when nature wishes to reveal that despite all of our plans, all of our vaunted organization, humans are no match for the power unleashed in natural disasters.