There’s some joke with the punchline “I’m from the government, and I’m here to help!” Righties love that one. They’re big on self-reliance, except when they need help themselves. Then they scream bloody murder if the government isn’t there pronto, even though rightie politicians keep cutting funds for whatever it is that is needed. Somehow, the connection between gutting the budget of the National Forest Service and the NFS not putting out forest fires right away doesn’t click together in their brains.

Yesterday the freshly nominated Mitt Romney and his buddy Bobby Jindal toured a town flooded by Hurricane Isaac. Since Mittens doesn’t think the government should do anything to help anybody who doesn’t already hold an investment portfolio worth something in the six figures, I wondered why the hell he bothered. What would he say to the people he met?

Now we know —

Romney shook hands with National Guardsmen outside the U.S. Post Office and talked with a local resident, Jodie Chiarello, 42, who lost her home in Isaac’s flooding.

“He just told me to, um, there’s assistance out there,” Chiarello said of her conversation with Romney. “He said, go home and call 211.” That’s a public service number offered in many states.

Would the government at least provide her with goggles and a snorkel so she can find her submerged phone? Probably not.

Did Mittens say anything else? This is all I could find —

Romney, who chatted with a handful of storm victims and shook hands with first responders, didn’t have too much to say. “I’m here to learn and obviously to draw some attention to what’s going on here,” Romney told Republican Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal, who he accompanied to the Jean Lafitte town hall to meet with emergency workers. “So that people around the country know that people down here need help.”

That snippet of conversation represented the bulk of Romney’s public remarks in Louisiana on Friday.

Jindal may be a doofus, but he’s a doofus who probably wants to run for public office again someday.

His host, Jindal, is now calling on the federal government to expand the rebuilt flood protection system that prevented serious flooding in New Orleans during this week’s storm. That system, built after flooding from Katrina devastated much of New Orleans, cost the Army Corps of Engineers $14.5 billion. It doesn’t extend as far as Jean Lafitte, which is situated in Jefferson Parish, and has been affected by a series of hurricanes, including Katrina, Rita, Cindy and now Isaac.

“It is absolutely critical that the Corps, and certainly our delegation working them, but that the Corps and the federal government look at those other levees,” Jindal said Thursday. Lafitte is included in a proposed ring levee that the state hopes to build, but there are no concrete plans to build yet.

Romney was silent on whether, as president, he would support paying for such an expansion. Romney’s running mate, Wisconsin Rep. Paul Ryan, has proposed eliminating $10 billion a year in disaster spending and requiring Congress to pay for emergencies by cutting from elsewhere in the budget. That proposal was blocked by GOP leaders.

You know that deep inside, Mitt Romney feels much tender pity for those people who lost everything in the flood, and he hopes they can build shelters for themselves from scrap lumber and perhaps get a few hot meals from the local church ladies. But in Mitt’s World it’s not government’s job to help people who are sitting around whining because they just lost everything they own to a storm. Tax money spent on moochers like Jodie Chiarello may threaten his tax cuts. And if people need money to rebuild, they can always borrow from their parents, right, Mitt?

The most significant fact about last night’s GOP convention finale may be that Here Comes Honey Boo Boo got better ratings. Of these two prime time programs, one was a reality show about a tribe of clueless rednecks, and the other starred a mouthy little girl with a pet pig.

Everybody’s talking today about Clint Eastwood’s bizarre stand-up act. I believe it must have been bizarre, because I did a news google for “Eastwood bizarre” and got more than 14,000 hits. I take it the crowd in Tampa ate it up, but it sounds even more cringe-inducing that Honey Boo Boo.

My impression overall is that the whole convention was weirdly unfocused. And IMO this is in large part because Republicans can’t decide who they are running against. Steve Kornacki writes that Romney thinks he is running against Jimmy Carter, for example. His acceptance speech was supposed to cast himself as Reagan versus the bumbling peanut farmer Reagan ran against in 1980. I personally don’t think Jimmy Carter himself was that Jimmy Carter, although it’s a debatable point. But Barack Obama is way not that Jimmy Carter. Not even close.

David Firestone writes that in his speech, Romney addressed the President as if he were a wayward child whose behavior had been disappointing. I can’t imagine that’s going to work on anyone, frankly.

Other parts of the Republican Party, of course, are opposing Barack “Saul Alinsky” Obama, subversive radical. And some are opposing Barack “Stepin Fetchit” Obama, affirmative action hire. Meanwhile, the real Barack Obama probably is feeling pretty good about his chances right now.

Nate Silver says we won’t know how big a bounce Mittens got from the convention until early next week, so just ignore any headlines about a bounce until then. Mittens needs at least a four-point bounce if he’s got a shot at overtaking the President, Nate says. Nate’s graphs currently have the President’s chance of winning getting larger, and Mitt’s smaller.

And then there will be the Dem convention, and the debates. Heh.

Sometimes when righties have a new obsession I fail to make connections to where the obsession came from. Yesterday I saw that a number of righties were calling Mittens the “new James Knox Polk.” To which I thought, They want to invade Mexico? WTF? Not that I’d put it past them.

It turns out that operatives like Karl Rove are circulating the idea that Mittens expects to be a one-term president who will enact a bunch of significant stuff and then retire, as Polk did. And Romney’s staff seems to be the source of this notion. Some of them are telling reporters that Romney plans to “fix things” even if it means enacting unpopular policies and taking the political hit.

John Ward writes,

Multiple senior Romney advisers assured me that they had had conversations with the candidate in which he conveyed a depth of conviction about the need to try to enact something like Ryan’s controversial budget and entitlement reforms. Romney, they said, was willing to count the cost politically in order to achieve it.

The idea that Whiplash Willard would fall on his sword for anything — well, unless there’s a tax write-off involved — strikes me as preposterous, but let’s go with this for a moment. Jonathan Chait writes that Republicans see Romney as the last hope for imposing their vision of America on the rest of us before they are swamped by changing demographics —

A Republican strategist said something interesting and revealing on Friday, though it largely escaped attention in the howling gusts of punditry over Mitt Romney’s birth certificate crack and a potential convention-altering hurricane. The subject was a Ron Brownstein story outlining the demographic hit rates each party requires to win in November. To squeak out a majority, Mitt Romney probably needs to win at least 61 percent of the white vote — a figure exceeding what George H.W. Bush commanded over Michael Dukakis in 1988. The Republican strategist told Brownstein, “This is the last time anyone will try to do this” — “this” being a near total reliance on white votes to win a presidential election.

I wrote a long story last February arguing that the Republican Party had grown intensely conscious of both the inescapable gravity of the long-term relative decline of the white population, and the short-term window of opportunity opened for the party by the economic crisis. I think we’re continuing to see the GOP operate under an integrated political and policy strategy constructed on this premise. This is their last, best chance to win an election in the party’s current demographic and ideological form. Future generations of GOP politicians will have to appeal to nonwhite voters who hold far more liberal views about the role of government than does the party’s current base. …

… Blowing up the welfare state and affecting the largest upward redistribution of wealth in American history is a politically tricky project (hence Romney’s belief that he may need to forego a second term). Hence the Romney campaign’s clear plan to suture off its slowly declining but still potent base.

Mittens literally is selling himself to the Republican Party as the Last White Hope.

See also Thomas Schaller, “Republican National Convention: Heart of Whiteness.”

I have advice that leftie vocational protesters will never take, but here goes anyway — When your opponent is voluntarily making a fool of himself in public, stay out of the bleeping way.

The Republican National Convention promises to be a hot mess. Evan McMorris-Santoro writes,

Unfortunately for the man who’s just days from finally sealing the deal and becoming the Republican presidential nominee, the Republican Party’s frayed edges are on full display here even as delegates wait for the actual convention to start.

The come-together moment follows a week that ripped open the wounds of the Republican primary that were supposed to be fully healed in time for Romney’s big party.

See also “A Party of Factions Gathers, Seeking Consensus.”

I know somebody’s going to say Republicans always put on a perfectly choreographed show and everyone’s going to snap into place as always, blah blah, and maybe that will happen. But they’ve got a candidate many of them don’t like who can’t get his message straight — he went back to bragging about his Massachusetts health care law this week, which infuriates a lot of them — and more so than in the past there are big factions of rightie activists who put ideology way over party, and who would rather lose than compromise. Which works for me.

Plus, it’s a fact that this year’s platform is the most extreme ever and nuttier than a peanut farm.

What happens at the conventions still can sway an election, IMO. The pundits may disagree, but I think the 1992 GOP convention helped elect Bill Clinton. Clinton was helped by Pat Buchanan’s social war address, Marilyn Quayle’s cringe inducing “I am better than Hillary” speech, and the poignant moment when Mary Fisher, infected with HIV, told the convention that “We have killed each other with our ignorance, our prejudice and our silence.” It was widely seen as a rebuke of the Republican Party, particularly after Buchanan’s hateful ranting about “homosexual rights.”

So I say let Republicans be Republicans. Let them be themselves, and let America see them for who and what they are. Just pass the popcorn.