It’s been a week since wildfires on Maui ravaged the island and sent residents streaming into the ocean to avoid the flames. So far, Joe Biden has “no comment” about the casualties and, presumably, he has nothing to say about the massive relief efforts that are surely underway.
But are they underway? According to the Wall Street Journal, “State and federal aid is trickling into the region in the wake of the deadliest U.S. wildfire event in over 100 years.” So after a full week, aid is just “trickling in” from FEMA to deal with the destruction of most of the Western part of Maui?
In 2005, within 24 hours of Hurricane Katrina making landfall, left-wing blogs and the national media were screaming about a lack of disaster relief for New Orleans. They were (rightly) blaming George Bush’s FEMA director Michael Brown, whose previous experience as a horse impresario didn’t reassure anyone that he was up to the task.
Brown didn’t do a bad job. There were supplies positioned outside the city, waiting for the storm to pass. Unfortunately, according to a House Committee on the response to the hurricane, the problem was the incompetence of New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin and Louisiana Governor Kathleen Blanco. The supplies were never distributed. And the hysteria generated by Nagin about “babies being raped” certainly didn’t help anything.
The point is simple; Biden’s “no comment” is hiding a lack of relief for Maui residents. How do we know? Maui residents are organizing their own relief efforts.
Many Maui residents have since launched their own relief efforts, shuttling supplies to the fire-devastated region by boat. For days, a mini-flotilla of aid-laden boats have arrived off the shore of Kaanapali, just north of Lahaina.
On Saturday aboard the Lani Kai, a host of volunteers and a few journalists joined its captain and first officer as the boat made way toward Kaanapali, keeping about a mile off shore as it passed the charred remains of Lahaina.
“Maui and Hawaii has always been about aloha. It’s a very small community and we need to help each other,” Spencer Erwin, the boat’s captain, said.
“Aloha, as anyone here will tell you, refers to a broad sense of love and fellowship,” the WSJ noted.
“It’s every man, woman and child doing what they can to help, imagining that’s their brother without any supplies on the westside of Maui,” Erwin said.
So where is FEMA? Where is Biden? Ordinary people doing the job that FEMA and the federal government should be doing hasn’t even elicited a peep from most in the media. Of course not, because Joe Biden and the Hawaiian government are Democrats.
We don’t necessarily mind that our politicians couldn’t care less about us. We just need them to be a little convincing when the weather gets really bad.
But given the political tarring and feathering of [Ted]Cruz and the political crucifixion of Bush, how is Biden able to get away with the response of “no comment,” let alone the fact that his entire brand is empathy, empathy, and more empathy?
The answer is simple: the Democratic Party cares as much about empathy as it does any other emotion. To Democrats, emotions are nothing but tools to use as smoke screens in the pursuit of power.
If you’re the leader of the Democratic Party and the United States, you’re allowed to smile and sunbathe while Americans perish in the worst natural disaster that Hawaii has ever faced.
As long as Democratic Party operatives control the narrative in the major media, this state of affairs will continue—and get worse.
Join the conversation as a VIP Member