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June 28, 2021

The WaPo's so-called 'journalism' consists of false attacks on Gov. DeSantis

By Andrea Widburg

Although only a small number of people have officially been declared dead following the condo collapse in Miami, Florida, it appears that as many as 159 people may have died.  To any decent person, this is a tragedy.  To Hannah Dreier, though, a "national reporter" at the Washington Post, what happened in Miami is an opportunity to score political points against Governor Ron DeSantis.  That would be tasteless at best, but what makes Dreier's attack a total flail is that she got her facts completely wrong.

Here's Dreier's contention that DeSantis's incompetence or negligence was responsible for what could have been a fatal delay in conducting a search-and-rescue mission in the rubble:

There's nothing subtle about it.  According to Dreier, people died because DeSantis couldn't be bothered to act.  However, Dreier is plain wrong.  The facts are that, from Miami's mayor on up, the whole process happened with appropriate speed.  Giancarlo Sopo brought the facts to Dreier's smear job:

The timeline of events shows that Sopo is correct.  The building collapsed shortly before 1:30 A.M. on June 24.  According to the first page that Sopo attached to his tweet, by 4:30 in the afternoon on the same day, Miami-Dade's mayor had declared a local state of emergency.  The State of Emergency explicitly notes that "[c]ounty and municipal first responders were immediately deployed to the area to aid in the search and rescue operation in the Town of Surfside[.]"

The point of the Declaration of Emergency is not to get first responders to the scene of the disaster.  Instead, as the declaration itself states, the point is to allow "further orders [to] be issued to protect the health, safety, and welfare of the community."  The emergency declaration also allows the government to allocate funds on an emergency basis.

If you look at the second page attached to Sopo's tweet, you can see that DeSantis signed off on the emergency declaration immediately.  Thus, the official stamp on the page with DeSantis's signature says the order was filed by 5:32 P.M. on June 24 — that is, it was filed less than an hour after the mayor issued the declaration.

Knowing how offices work, it's likely that DeSantis's signature was on there in something substantially less than an hour — and again, this doesn't have to do with search-and-rescue operations.  It has to do with subsequent actions and funding.

Moreover, the way things played out reflected the proper chain of command:

Ultimately, as a New York Times article explains, the rescue process is a slow one because, when a building collapses, moving debris in one place can cause dangerous shifts in another place, endangering both the rescue personnel and the survivors.  That long, slow process — which requires special funding and the reallocation of state and local resources — is why there are emergency declarations.

Dreier could have known this if she'd made the slightest effort to investigate.  However, at publications such as the Washington Post, if there's anything that creates an opportunity to attack a Republican, "journalists" don't investigate things.  They simply opine and pretend they know what they're talking about.

Shame on Dreier for using a tragedy to make a tacky and erroneous political attack.

Image: DeSantis signs a bill, by Andrea Widburg using a YouTube screen grab.

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