Thanks to Pam Spaulding for catching this outrageous rant from Michelle Bachmann. As Tropical Storm Isaac approaches the Louisiana coast, we revisit this statement…

“Washington, D.C., you’d think by now they’d get the message,” Bachmann said at a town hall in Florida last August while campaigning for the GOP presidential nomination. “An earthquake, a hurricane, are you listening? The American people have done everything they possibly can, now it’s time for an act of God and we’re getting it.”

Is she really serious about God speaking through natural disasters? What does she think Isaac is, a thumbs-up from the Lord and a punch at the heathen Gulf Coast?

She talks like she’s The Godfather, and the Almighty is her very own Luca Brasi– a big, mute, hit man who whacks her enemies. But that’s just her lighthearted sense of humor…

Her campaign press secretary at the time, Alice Stewart, later said the congresswoman’s remarks were a joke.

Bachmann is a major star in the Republican Party. Perhaps Isaac and the anniversary of Hurricane Katrina will open some discussions more improving than speculations on the spiritual meaning of loss and suffering in our neighbors.

Is memory so short that they have forgotten Hurricane Katrina? Have they forgotten that after a botched evacuation that left thousands of the poorest and least able stranded in the center of New Orleans, the levees catastrophically failed? That this historic disaster threw into sharp relief the worst that corruption, neglect and political dysfunction can do to worsen a crisis? That the good energy and skills of Americans who came to help our own were often squandered and aid diverted? That we have unfinished business in New Orleans?

That would be too materialistic, wouldn’t it?