Disastrous politics

First and foremost, the LBK team would like to extend our heartfelt condolences to those in the Heartland who bore the brunt of mother nature's fury in the past few days.

It seems, however, that Kansas bloggers and politicians think these disasters are a good time to make some political hay.

Appropriately, Sen. Pat Roberts began running a new campaign commercial, "Greensburg" this week. The commercial shows the good Senator and his wife, Franki, walking around touring the destruction in Greensburg.

Honestly, our hats are off to Senator Roberts for being quick to get to Greensburg and tour the devastation with the rest of the Kansas Congressional delegation, but it seems he was the only one to bring a camera crew along.

An entire town was destroyed, several people were killed and even more injured, and Pat Roberts uses it for his own political gain. Classy.

Now, after an E-F3 tornado demolished the city of Chapman and the same storm produced an E-F4 tornado that sliced through Manhattan and the campus of Kansas State University before moving on to Jackson County, the craziest of all crazy Republican bloggers decides it'd be a good topic to attack the anti-coal crowd again (don't worry, it doesn't make sense to us either).

Typically, we don't link to the Meadowlark. We have a policy that his neurotic (although well-researched) rants aren't worth responding to, but today we'd like to make an exception to prove a larger point. Natural disasters are off limits.

Meadowlark argues that the research reactor at KSU (which doesn't actually provide power for anything) is a microcosm of the coal fight. He likens the political backlash against coal today to the backlash against nuclear energy in the past, and apparently this storm is somehow supposed to make us realize we should build the plants in Holcomb. I told you, dude is crazy!

Anyway, even if that argument made sense, which it doesn't, natural disasters such as this one, which took the lives of two people in Dickinson and Jackson counties, are not fodder for political advancement. They're tragedies, and should be viewed as such.

Shame on you Pat Roberts, and shame on the Kansas Meadowlark.