tpaw on cavuto stillOn his “Your World” show Wednesday, Fox News host Neil Cavuto introduced Gov. Tim Pawlenty by showing a clip from the 1973 movie “The Exorcist” in which a young woman levitates over a bed. Cavuto asked, “Where is Linda Blair when you need her?”

A truly odd intro, but far more disturbing was the weather outside the downtown Minneapolis TV studio from which Pawlenty’s arguments against the health care reform bill were being transmitted to the heavens.

Less than an hour earlier and only three blocks away, a freak tornado had wreaked havoc on downtown. A church spire was twisted, a convention-center roof sheltering a convention of Lutherans started letting in rain, and — echoes of “The Exorcist” — a woman on the sidewalk was lifted into the air before being set down again unharmed. (No one was hurt but property damage was widespread.)

The storm had taken Minnesota’s biggest city by surprise. As sirens wailed belatedly, debris closed a freeway and south Minneapolis — where garages slid into alleys, and walls at the Electric Fetus record store caved in — was cruelly deforested. In the suburbs, the winds vandalized a middle school and ransacked a residential street.

But the backdrop behind the governor on the video uplink from Ascent Media studios gave Fox News viewers a view of downtown Minneapolis under unchanging, placid skies.

The local airwaves crackled with damage reports and weather warnings, but the governor carried on his national cable-news conversation with Cavuto as if nothing was the matter — except, according to Pawlenty, everything to do with public assistance in this country:

The federal government has run every entitlement program they have essentially into the ground: Medicare is broke; Medicaid is broke; Social Security is broke. They have run every program they have in that nature into the ground. Why would we give them another one to run and manage into the ground?

Seeing the governor wax cranky about government while first responders rushed to a variety of disaster scenes all around him struck some viewers as strangely dissonant, suggesting a variation on Cavuto’s question: Where is Tim Pawlenty when you need him?

At 3:05 p.m., the Associated Press’ Brian Bakst observed via Twitter: “Pawlenty live on Fox News now ripping Obama on health care. Bad timing given tornadoes all over metro?”

The day was momentous enough that an hour later Pawlenty was moved to send his first Twitter message since June 24. But it wasn’t about the storm: “Was on Neil Cavuto’s show today. Here’s the link: http://is.gd/2oTf4.”

After the local news channels had shown off their footage of the wreckage that evening, Dusty Trice, a partisan Democratic blogger, let loose on the governor with a posting titled, “Maybe Someone Should Tell Tim Pawlenty There Was A Tornado In Minneapolis.” Trice faulted Pawlenty for not being “willing to break an appearance on FOX when a tornado tears through one of his home state’s major metropolitan areas.”

Bob Collins of Minnesota Public Radio picked up on that point the next morning, tweeting first, “Someone should do a story about the debate at the gov’s office over whether to wake him to tell him about the tornadoes.” Then, after Pawlenty’s appearance over national airwaves, on another right-leaning program, “Gov was on Bill Bennett’s show this morning on health care. Still no proclamation order for MnDOT to supply help with tornado cleanup.”

According to Pawlenty spokesman Brian McClung, the governor hasn’t declared an emergency because no one has asked:

Governor Pawlenty was in downtown Minneapolis when the tornado was passing through and he saw some of the storm’s impact around the Minneapolis Convention Center.

Our Emergency Management personnel closely monitored the storm and the Governor was provided with regular updates throughout the afternoon on Wednesday.

Homeland Security and Emergency Management staff reached out to the City of Minneapolis and offered state assistance.  Minneapolis has not requested any assistance at this time.

While it was a significant storm it has been handled well.

Indeed, Minneapolis Mayor R.T. Rybak’s spokesman, Jeremy Hanson, told the Minnesota Independent that such a request was unlikely. Rybak is a potential contender to succeed Pawlenty, with whom he regularly locks horns. On his blog, Rybak lauded the actions of emergency responders and ordinary citizens.

Here’s the video clip of Pawlenty on Cavuto’s program: