As we all know by now, Texas experienced a catastrophic flash flood over the weekend. Over a hundred people are known dead so far, including an entire girls’ camp and its counselors. For the parents of these children, there is probably no way to capture in words the extent of their grief. You send your fifth grade daughter off to summer camp to have fun and build memories, and you never see her again. What you’re left with is the probability that your child died a horrible and terrifying death. The mothers and fathers very likely would prefer that they’d been sent a draft notice to hell. When my brother died at 16 in an car wreck, I don’t think my parents ever fully recovered.
I was therefore particularly disgusted with the Washington Post’s rush to turn this story into a political farce — another indictment of Donald Trump. It took the Post exactly three paragraphs to, in its sleazy and roundabout but unmistakable way, pin it on the President. This is how its nauseating story begins:
Could the torrential flooding that surged the Guadalupe River in Central Texas nearly two dozen feet in several hours, washing away campers as young as 8 years old and killing at least 90 people, been better forecast? And could people who were in harm’s way been better warned?
These are all painful, important questions being asked after the Fourth of July flash floods in Kerr County that caught local officials off guard with their intensity and have already become one of the deadliest in the United States in decades.
But climate scientists say that extreme weather events like this flood could soon become even harder to track and predict because President Donald Trump wants to effectively end climate science research in the country. His administration dismantled efforts to lower carbon emissions that are rapidly warming the planet and making extreme weather more extreme and more frequent.
The Post and other leftist components in the media have long since made it clear that they do not accept the results of last November’s election and will re-litigate out to infinity the issues they argued and lost — climate change, transgenderism, slightly disguised black supremacy and the rest of it. They have also made clear that they intend to do this with both carefree deceit and unrelenting fury — fury that, as I said in my last post, they know full well, but (at best) don’t care, will ignite assassination fantasies in some of their fringe. And as we, and they, have seen twice in the last year, it won’t always stop with mere fantasies.
The National Review notes how far some of the Left’s snarling has gone.
The presumption that this administration was indirectly responsible for the deaths in Texas soon congealed into a consensus in online forums. You can guess at the tenor of that discussion, but we’ll give you a taste of it via Rosie O’Donnell: “It’s because he put this country in so much danger by his horrible, horrible decisions and this ridiculously immoral bill that he just signed into law,” the performer said from self-imposed exile in Ireland of the GOP reconciliation bill that Trump signed into law on the day of the floods. “As Republicans cheered, people will die as a result, and they’ve started already.”
Because the Post in particular was more eager to write a political story than cover the facts on the ground, its story is — for whatever may be said of its motivation — just ignorant. As the NR points out:
In anticipation of this deadly system, the National Weather Service “had extra staff on duty during the storms,” according to the Associated Press. “There were extra people in here that night,” NWS meteorologist Jason Runyen told AP reporters, “and that’s typical in every weather service office — you staff up for an event and bring people in on overtime and hold people over.”
Although the scale of this event was not precisely forecast, the storm was anticipated, and warnings about it were disseminated well before its impacts were felt by local residents. “The National Weather Service issued a flood watch for Kerr County more than 12 hours ahead of the catastrophic flood,” CBS Austin meteorologist Avery Tomasco wrote. “A flash flood warning was issued for Hunt and Ingram three hours before the Guadalupe started to climb. They did their job, and they did it well.”
I get the eagerness to blame someone or something. What I don’t get is the failure or refusal to recognize that natural disasters can happen with great speed and force, and the refusal to accept on political grounds that this was one of them.
Still, you have to give the Democrats credit, if that’s the right word, for learning the political utility of suffering. As Dan McLaughlin points out, Hurricane Katrina
…did so much lasting political damage to Bush — who had evaded many efforts until then to bring him down — that the Katrina model became the default response to natural disasters: a rush to fill the gaps in public knowledge with a narrative that could outrun those facts precisely because it was swiftly adopted while emotions were running highest.
Hence the WaPo can only wait until its fourth paragraph to quote, in a story ostensibly about a flash flood in Texas, a political science professor from that hub of unbiased inquiry, the University of California at Santa Barbara:
Leah Stokes, a political scientist at the University of California at Santa Barbara and co-host of the climate podcast “A Matter of Degrees,” told me earlier this year that this is part of a broader attempt to deny that climate change is real and is affecting everyday lives. But Americans who have experienced extreme floods, fires and hurricanes can connect the dots.
…the dots leading to the conclusion that Donald Trump kills little girls.
“What the Trump administration is doing is regressive in every way,” said Daniel Schrag, a climate scientist at Harvard University. “That’s an attack on basic knowledge, on basic day-to-day weather and the knowledge of whether climate change is intensifying this kind of flooding. If I was in Texas, I would want to know. But in the new Trump administration, those questions can’t even be asked.”
They can’t be asked, that is, except in national outlets like the Post and essentially every other corner of the media. Try watching your TV for ten minutes tonight and see if you can avoid hearing those questions being asked.
Not that they’re actually questions, mind you. They’re just the continuation of last year’s campaign — the campaign the Left is too churlish to admit it lost and too disgusting to avoid using children’s deaths to continue waging.
Democrats/leftists never cease to amaze me with how far they will go in their quest for power. Excellent article, thank you for continuing the good fight.
Words cannot possibly convey the evil of these people who say and write these things. The Post pretends to couch it in scientific terms and blames the government (And Trump of course. If a Democrat were president these evil scoundrels would blame the government of Texas specifically) But as vile as this story is it pales next to the vomit on social media. Today it was reported that a PEDIATRICIAN in Houston was fired from her job after tweeting that MAGA voters in the county have no one to blame but themselves. Their depths are limitless and it makes me physically nauseous. Here where I live in Georgetown Texas (Which was also flooded though thankfully not a fraction as bad) the community donated so many goods to the town that they were told to stop. This is the real America not the dystopian nightmare of the Washington Post and social media.