All this week, John McCain and his campaign have been jumping up and down, waving their arms and asking the media to pay some attention to them. As part of that campaign, McCain planned to counterprogram Barack Obama's big speech in Berlin today by traveling to an oil rig in the Gulf of Mexico to talk about offshore oil drilling. But that trip has been canceled -- supposedly, because of bad weather. But there may have been another, better reason for the cancellation.

Politico's Ben Smith notes that, in fact, the weather in New Orleans is partly cloudy and calm. In contrast to that weather, as my friend Steve Benen pointed out, you can currently smell diesel fuel in that city's historic French Quarter. That's because of a collision between a barge and a tanker that led to the spillage of thousands of gallons of oil. Not exactly the kind of image you want as you're making a speech about how environmentally safe more offshore drilling would be.