Cindy Lou stayed away

NEW ORLEANS, LA (AP)--Republican presidential candidate and lying suck-up John Sidney McCain III took stock of still-FUBAR areas of New Orleans on Thursday and declared that if the disaster had happened on his watch, he would have immediately crash-landed at the nearest Air Force base.

McCain called the response to Hurricane Katrina "a perfect storm" of mismanagement by federal, state and local governments, then laughed at his little joke and demanded doughnuts.

The Arizona senator walked a few blocks of the previously-submerged Lower 9th Ward, passing abandoned structures with their facades still spray-painted with the markings of rescue workers who went door to door nearly three years ago searching for the bodies. Government-issued trailers still pollute the neighborhood with their toxic formaldehyde off-gassing. McCain said his teenage daughter Bridget had been there with a volunteer youth group a few weeks ago to help in the recovery, but didn't like it much.

"Never again, never again, will a disaster of this nature be handled in the disgraceful way it was handled," McCain declared, a pledge he repeated over and over during the day in a vain attempt to convince the locals that the rich old white guy gives a rat's ass what happens in this hellhole.

McCain is campaigning this week in what he calls "forsaken" areas of the country, where the colored folks is at, and he assured the superstitious natives that their situation was not lost on him.

"I've been going to places that are perhaps very cynical about government," he told students during a town hall at Xavier University. Trying to reach out for the votes of Democrats and independents, he pledged to be a president who would take action to erase that cynicism, by force if necessary.

"As president of the United States, I'm not going to let anybody alone," he said.

McCain was unsparing in his criticism of the Bush administration on Katrina, and said members of Congress other than himself must share the blame for putting money into pork-barrel projects, when those dollars could have been used to fortify the region against disaster. He said his record was clean on that count, with a consistent opposition to wasteful spending if you don't count the war in Iraq, which he refused to characterize as the single most expensive mistake in American history.

Without mentioning Bush directly, McCain said that when Katrina struck, "If I had been president, I would have ordered the plane crashed at the nearest base and I'd have been over here." He repeated that later, saying, "I would've crashed my airplane at the nearest Air Force base and come over personally."

In a conversation with reporters aboard his campaign bus, McCain rejected the notion that he ran any risk of guilt by association with the Bush administration by coming to New Orleans, especially since the people writing the stories are all eating his barbecue and drinking his booze.