Sandy’s Gone, but the Left’s Hot Air Remains

by: tim dunkin | published: 11 06, 2012

Never let a crisis go to waste – the new conventional “wisdom” of cynical, predatory politics to which this nation has been introduced by the current Administration and its cronies throughout government and the mainstream media. Instead of uniting the nation, as he promised to do when he ran on Hope and Change in 2008, Obama and his lackeys have instead sought at every turn to divide and fragment Americans into easily manageable, bite-size chunks to be devoured by the ugly politics of personal destruction and cynical self-advancement. Seeking to use every misfortune that befell the people of this nation to their perceived advantage, the Left has lied and connived every chance it got, seeking to deceive us, to turn us against each other, to entice us into dependency and poverty, against our own self-interest. The latest in their parade of duplicity has been the effort to take the tragedy of Hurricane Sandy and turn it into yet another chance to score political points.

What can we say about the terrible events which have taken place in New Jersey, New York, and the surrounding areas? Surely what we see taking place before us on the nightly news is a cause for grave concern in the hearts of every American. Now, of all times, is a chance for us to come together, to put aside petty differences, and to reach out to try to help fellow Americans in need. The Left, however, hasn’t seen it this way. Instead, the Left sees the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy as a chance to advance their own agenda, in a number of ways. A shameful display of shamelessness.

Take, for example, the wholly unearned kudos that President Obama has been given by an in-the-bag mainstream media. The actual extent of Obama’s response to Hurricane Sandy was to do a fly-by of the New Jersey coast, and then jet off to the next fundraiser. To the extent that the mechanisms of government disaster response have kicked into gear, Obama’s administration, along with other cronies on the Left, has actually been flubbing the relief efforts. FEMA, ever ready to kink up the works, ran out of something as basic as bottled water, and reports have said that what it was able to lay hold of, it couldn’t even get to people in the affected areas until today (Monday). Obama made a big show out of giving free gasoline to people in the disaster areas, which also devolved into a massive pileup of logistical failures. People in New York City are still without food, many are eating out of dumpsters, and are reportedly having to relieve themselves in the hallways of their still-dark apartment buildings. All across the affected regions, people are still cold, hungry, and in the dark. This disaster response has been worse than that to Katrina – yet the media treats Obama and his administration’s response as if they were the very definition of efficiency.

The rest of the Left hasn’t done much better. Michael Bloomberg – an ostensible Republican, but one who has endorsed Obama and who is basically at odds with pretty much everything his own Party stands for – earmarked food, water, and generators for the New York Marathon, of all things, until the outcry became so great that he finally cancelled the event. The last reports indicate that most of these supplies are still sitting in Central Park, unused, not helping in the least those who need them. What Bloomberg has made sure to be on top of, however, is to keep out National Guard units that could help in the city – since he doesn’t want any more “guns on the streets of New York.” Cold comfort, I’m sure, to those New Yorkers who are having to deal with lawless gangs of thugs and looters taking advantage of the darkness and lack of adequate policing each night.

Then, of course, you have the unions. Power crews from Alabama and Florida have actually been turned away from restoring power in the affected areas – because the crews were not unionized. So much for the spirit of coming together. If you don’t have the right politics or aren’t in a union, we’d rather let people freeze in the darkness than let you help us keep them warm and safe. One wonders whether this is the tipping point where unions, or at least the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers, have gone from merely being obnoxious to being a legitimate threat to the safety and welfare of the American people.

So no, despite the cheerleading from ABCNNBCBSMSNBC, Obama’s, and the Left’s in general, response to this disaster has not been very good at all. In fact, it has been a disaster, as well.

But never fear – while the media may not be telling us the truth about Obama’s response, you can be sure that they WILL use the opportunity to mock and ridicule Mitt Romney for using campaign stops as opportunities to raise money and supplies to be sent to disaster-stricken areas in the Northeast. So while Obama was jetting off to fundraisers, Romney was using stops that could have been limited to stump speeches and campaigning, and using them to help people affected by Sandy instead. And the media make fun of him for it, as if private aid was a bad thing or something.

The media have also been quick to tell us that Sandy was the result of…drum roll please…global warming. In place of an actual reasoned look at the science, the media have been trying to gin up fear and emotion, trying to scare people into believing that if we don’t deindustrialize the country right now, then we can expect more and more earth-scouring hurricanes like Sandy to wipe our shores clean of human life.

It’s all nonsense, of course. Sandy was no more the result of global warming than World War II was. In fact, despite the damage she has caused, Sandy was not even that large of a hurricane. Sandy was only a Category 2 storm while over the Bahamas, and was barely a Category 1 when she hit the US mainland last Monday (80 mph winds, to even rate as a hurricane, a storm has to have 72 mph sustained winds). Hurricane Sandy was as destructive as she was not because she was this powerful megastorm of cyclonic destruction, but because she struck a densely-populated area, at high tide (hence, a larger than normal storm surge), while colliding with a southbound Nor’easter – a confluence of circumstances that magnified her destructive capacity beyond what it would have been had she struck the much less urbanized and less Nor’easter prone North Carolina or Florida coasts. It doesn’t help that many of the local residents apparently did not prepare adequately for her coming.

Further, as I’ve noted previously, it is not actually that unusual for hurricanes to make it as far north as New Jersey and New York. Recorded storms have been doing so since the colonists began keeping records back in the mid-17^th century, long before the Industrial Revolution.

Long story short? Sometimes hurricanes just go that far north, and sometimes circumstances can collude to make a storm more damaging than it otherwise would be. This isn’t evidence for global warming, it’s just evidence that we live on a planet with an extremely complex atmosphere that often does things we don’t like. Is it simply vile, dishonest opportunism and scaremongering to try to play the “global warming” card at a time like this.

Another way in which the Left has tried to use Sandy to their advantage is to tout her as an example of the “need” for big government, as the New York Times did after she was gone. “See,” the leftist argument goes, “we have to have big government to handle these types of big problems when they arise!” Never mind that, as noted above, big government hasn’t done such a great job of actually helping out the freezing, starving, dehydrated people in the afflicted areas of the Northeast. As with Katrina – which saw truckload after truckload after truckload of relief supplies from companies like Wal-Mart or gathered by private religious and charitable organizations delivered to the disaster area while FEMA was still fumbling around for its flashlight – we see that private aid is actually doing a better job of helping than big government acronymic organizations. If there’s anything that ought to be a take home message for voters and Americans, it is that big government hinders more than it helps, and the bigger the government, the more it tends to gum up its own workings.

As we should have expected, the parasitic, opportunistic Left has used Sandy as an opportunity to swing public sentiment its way. This seems to have worked to a certain extent, as the most recent polls show the race tightening (though Romney still slightly ahead), undoubtedly due to the largely undeserved backpatting that Obama has gotten from the nightly news outfits and others on the Left. This is to the shame of large swathes of the American people who can’t, apparently, think for themselves or provide themselves with enough information to make informed, intelligent choices. Nevertheless, for those of us who can reason through the information we receive and who can discern and negate the filtration of that information done by the MSM, we can see Hurricane Sandy as both a terrible tragedy and as a failure of big government progressivism, getting in our way as we try to help our fellow Americans in the Northeast. Let this be a lesson for us all.

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