Michael1942's Blog

Kuttner on TAP
A Tale of Two Hurricanes. You can bet that when Hurricane Florence slams into the Carolinas, FEMA will be there with everything possible to help. That is, to the extent that Trump’s inept appointees are capable of managing it. It’s fortunate that the Carolinians are not mostly Spanish-speaking.
Meanwhile, in the aftermath of the Commonwealth of Puerto Rico’s full accounting that 2,975 people died as a result of Hurricane Maria, not 64 as originally reported, most of them needlessly in the aftermath, the best Trump can do is blame local officials and praise FEMA’s pathetic foot-dragging.
In the never-ending contest for Trump’s biggest lie, this will surely go down as one of the most grotesque:
We got A Pluses for our recent hurricane work in Texas and Florida (and did an unappreciated great job in Puerto Rico, even though an inaccessible island with very poor electricity and a totally incompetent Mayor of San Juan). We are ready for the big one that is coming!
Now Trump is compounding the lie by blaming San Juan’s heroic mayor, Carmen Yulín Cruz, for FEMA’s failures and his own administration’s treatment of Puerto Ricans as second-class Americans. Cruz told Trump, “You left us here to die because you were more concerned about the political spin than about the human reality that we were dying.”
This shameful double standard should be front and center in Florida’s critical elections this November. ~ ROBERT KUTTNER

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