Rush Limbaugh Claims Obama Changed Hurricane Isaac Forecast to Hurt the GOP

Last updated on February 8th, 2013 at 01:24 am

Rush Limbaugh is claiming that President Obama is manipulating the forecasted path of Hurricane Isaac in order to hurt the Republican Party.

Here’s the audio from Media Matters:

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Transcript from Rush Limbaugh:

And keep in mind the reason I’m taking you through this.

The media is now out there saying that Hurricane Katrina is hanging like a pall over the Republican convention in Tampa. So this whole thing has been politicized, as the Democrats politicize everything, and that’s why we are talking about it. Now, I want to remind you: All last week… And, no, at no time here am I alleging a conspiracy. At no time. With none of this am I alleging conspiracy. All last week what was the target? Tampa. What was going on in Tampa this week?

The Republican National Convention. A pretty important one, too. Introducing the nominee, Mitt Romney. It’s only after the convention that Romney can actually start spending all of this money that he’s raised, so this convention is very important. It’s a chance to introduce Romney to a lot of people who don’t know him yet. And I noticed that the hurricane center’s track is — and I’m not alleging conspiracies here. The hurricane center is the regime; the hurricane center is the Commerce Department.

It’s the government.

It’s Obama.

And I’m noticing that that track stayed zeroed in on Tampa day after day after day. And the Republicans reacted to it accordingly over the weekend, canceling the first day of the convention. What could be better for the Democrats than the Republicans to cancel a day of this? Even though the media wasn’t going to televise a lot of it anyway, they can’t televise it if it isn’t happening. And the GOP brain trust decides, “Well, you know what? Looking at this forecast track, we don’t want to have this thing on Monday.

“We have delegates flying into town here, the port may be closed. It’s too dangerous. We don’t want people put at risk trying to get there. So we’ll shut it down. We’ll gavel it to order on Monday and we’ll do a bunch of pro forma stuff, but we actually won’t do anything seriously ’til Tuesday.” They made this announcement Saturday or Sunday, I forget which day. Now, Saturday night and all day Saturday I’m looking at the model runs, and the model runs come out every three to five hours, depending on which model. It’s two p.m., five p.m., et al p.m.

….

So I read the discussion, which is where they tell you how they arrived at their forecast track and other data. And they acknowledged that the model data had moved “precipitously to the west.” But for the purposes of continuity with the previous forecast — and this is almost a quote — they’re gonna leave the track unchanged. And I said, “Okay, well…” Again, I’m alleging no conspiracy. I don’t want anybody thinking I’m going somewhere with this. I’m just telling you what happened.

I’m sharing with you my thought process, ’cause I know full well that if you give these people the slightest chance and they’re gonna turn this into Katrina and they’re gonna scare the hell out of New Orleans and they’re gonna revive, “Bush doesn’t care about people” and revive all of it. They’re gonna politicize everything ’cause they do it. And now they had the model runs allowing them to do it.

Now they had these model runs allowing them to start scaring the hell out of people in New Orleans and make political connections to Bush.

It was all there.

Limbaugh is claiming that President Obama is ordering the National Hurricane Center to manipulate the forecasted path of the hurricane, so that Republicans will be forced to cancel their convention, and once Obama had tricked Republicans into cancelling the first day of the convention, he then changed the path of Isaac towards the Gulf so that Republicans would be pressured to cancel more days of their convention.

According to Limbaugh, Obama is doing of all this because he doesn’t want Mitt Romney to have a national audience. The problem with Limbaugh’s conspiracy that he claims isn’t a conspiracy theory is that the National Hurricane Center changes the projected paths of storms all of the time.

As more data is collected on the storm, models are changed, and predicted paths are altered. That is how an accurate forecast is arrived. Tropical storms and hurricanes change paths, and there is nothing political about the forecasts.

This is a step up from Limbaugh’s claim last week that Obama controls the weather, but it is still an absolutely insane conspiracy theory. Here’s an idea. If Republicans don’t want voters to be reminded of Katrina every four years, don’t hold your convention in South Florida during hurricane season.

Republicans like Limbaugh are blaming Obama for their own terrible decisions. Republicans and Rush Limbaugh should be worried about the people in the path of the storm, but all they can think about is how their precious convention is being ruined by Isaac.

Here’s a newsflash, a majority of Americans don’t care about Mitt Romney or his convention speech. If Isaac hits the Gulf region, our national attention will be turned to the situation there.

It would be a fitting dose of karma if the ghost of Katrina returned to remind us all of the high price that we pay for poor leadership. If this happens, hopefully nobody is harmed by the storm. Although, any damage is too much for a region that has fought so hard to rebuild.

Instead of acknowledging everything that they have screwed up, people like Rush Limbaugh sit around dreaming half baked conspiracy theories in order to blame Obama.

Because more than anything else, blaming Obama is the Republican way.



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