Death Tolls and Politics

I'm a bit overly sensitive to stories of hurricanes.  As I write this, Monday (today), we are staying in a house many hours from home, waiting for Hurricane Florence to complete her mission to the point that we can actually reach our house through unflooded roads, and that there is a house to reach when we arrive, with electricity.

Last year, of course, was a pretty difficult year for hurricanes, especially in certain areas of the mainland USA and in Puerto Rico.  We felt for the residents there and did whatever we could to support their local relief efforts.  That is never, of course, enough.

On Tuesday, as my best girl and I (with cat) were making the long drive to a less treacherous area, we started discussing not just the hurricane but the expected reaction.  I said that as soon as the relief effort started when Florence had passed, the left would be all over President Trump that it was not good enough, that FEMA was incompetent, etc.

I was wrong, of course.  Before Florence had even hit, some Democrat senator had complained that the Administration had moved $10 million in funding from FEMA to border security accounts.  Of course, as it turned out, the money -- a trifle in FEMA's budget anyway -- could not be programmed for disaster relief anyway based on Congressional direction, so the senator looked like a political fool, but that never stops Democrats.  Ask Maxine Waters.  And the people that voted for her.

At any rate, perhaps in preparation for Florence, the left is now doing their pre-hurricane complaining about President Trump's last oversight of a post-hurricane recovery, that being in Puerto Rico last year.  As you recall, the island, which had sketchy power and infrastructure to begin with due to decades of poor governance by Democrats there, was further devastated by a direct hit from a hurricane.

I wrote back then that it was not the responsibility of the taxpayers of the rest of the USA to pay to put in a brand-new infrastructure to make up for the mismanagement by people their voters had elected, even though the island was suffering the effects of damage that would have been far less under better management.

People did die there, of course.  But apparently, with Florence heading our way, it appears to be time to exaggerate the death toll dramatically, in the interest of making it sound far worse, and then to blame the president for that -- somehow.  Now, I don't exactly know how many did die as a direct result of the hurricane, but it sure wasn't 3,000, as the new study suggested, even if it was more than the 60 or so that had been the original count.

The study that everyone is quoting now did not try to count actual victims, but rather assessed the population of the island, applied normal birth rates and death rates -- statistical stuff that has no business in a sensitive cause-and-effect count.

But if there is a disaster, even a natural one, during the administration of Donald Trump, you can be sure that anything that can be twisted to embarrass this president will be done that way.

Naturally, President Trump did not take that massive hike in the suggested death toll that was politically motivated, without commentary.  As he tweeted,

"3000 people did not die in the two hurricanes that hit Puerto Rico. When I left the Island, AFTER the storm had hit, they had anywhere from 6 to 18 deaths. As time went by it did not go up by much. Then, a long time later, they started to report really large numbers, like 3000 ... This was done by the Democrats in order to make me look as bad as possible when I was successfully raising billions of dollars to help rebuild Puerto Rico. If a person died for any reason, like old age, just add them onto the list. Bad politics. I love Puerto Rico!"

When I read these stories, I seem to recall a similar situation.  There was a severe heat wave some years ago -- I want to say maybe 2003 or 2004 -- that was particularly rough in Chicago, where it was very hot for a week or so.

Naturally, the global warming warriors were out there tying to point out that this must have been due to man-made impacts on the climate, even though they are conspicuously absent during deep freezes like the one that killed tropical vegetation on the Carolinas coastal areas last winter.

So death totals started to come out from the left in Chicago, ascribing a large increase in deaths to the heat, and that old people were dying and the like, and it was George Bush's fault -- either George Bush, it didn't matter.  Lots of people were dying.  Pick a Bush.

Of course, before long it came out that the lefties were counting pretty much any death as being heat-related, including deaths in hospices and the like.  You died?  Well, it had to be the heat.  Didn't take long for that to come out.

I suspect a ton of that is going on now in Puerto Rico, which is unfortunate.  First, it means that the actual death toll will never be known, since it is now completely politicized.  Second, since at least some deaths that are indeed attributable to the hurricane would not have occurred had there been a decent infrastructure -- thanks again, Democrats -- we will see even the best counts corrupted by the situation as well as by politics.

If you have been watching the death toll from Florence -- and I can assure you, we are -- we already know that there are heart attack victims in the numbers.  Trust me, I went to medical school.  If you have a heart attack on the day of a hurricane, you were about to have one, one way or the other, momentarily, even if it were sunny.

President Trump and FEMA will do everything they can, because they are good people.  What they can do is, of course, affected by resources and by the fact that this is a natural disaster that is going to destroy homes and kill people despite our best efforts.  We will, by definition, fail, because nature is that awesome when circumstances line up that way.

What a shame that we have to politicize a hurricane recovery.

Copyright 2018 by Robert Sutton
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