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September 30, 2024

Kamala's Katrina

By Monica Showalter

It looks like Lahaina was a model, not a muck-up, in the federal response to natural disasters in the administration of Joe Biden and Kamala Harris.

The response to the aftermath of Hurricane Helene across 800 miles of ten states suggests it.

Get a load of Harris, who has decided that now's the time for an Instagram shoot.

Many noticed how 'Potemkin' it was:

The affected area has no electricity, no food, no water, no roads and at least a thousand are missing in North Carolina. There are many out reporting that FEMA is nowhere in sight. Yet here we are, looking at her response, which was to pose for an Instagram picture.

Now that she's on the hot seat for it, she's not answering any questions from the press:

Joe Biden was bad, too.

He sounds like a bitter old Ebenezer Scrooge, telling the helpless they're gettin' all their gonna get, more, in fact, despite the obviously unmet need. Can you imagine the response if George Bush had said anything like that in the wake of Hurricane Katrina in 2005?

Biden was not only not helping, he had been stingy with FEMA aid in Lahaina after a fire leveled that city. He also told the residents of East Palestine, Ohio, in the wake of a toxic train spill that they weren't getting a thing, either. This past June, Sens. Marco Rubio and Rick Scott of Florida looked under the hood at FEMA in anticipation of a hurricane like this one that just hit and found out that they were out of money, despite the periodic top-ups the always got from Congress.

I wrote about that here:

The Herald noted that FEMA's deputy administrator, Erik Hooks, speaking at a press conference last week, said they had never run out of money before, which must have been odd news to the people of Lahaina, Hawaii, where cash disbursements were meager while FEMA officials lived it up at some of Maui's top five-star hotels on the far north of the island. Maybe it's lavish salaries and vacay perks that are adding to the shortfalls.

But the issue of bankrolling illegals by FEMA first began to emerge as the Biden administration set up a conveyor belt for illegals to take them to their destinations of choice at Uncle Sam's expense, all expenses paid, and some of those expenses, as Howie Carr found out in his investigation, were very lavish indeed. How much of that is FEMA cash, routed through NGOs, through non-transparent means?

That's why Rubio's and Scott's letter is so important. FEMA is a federal agency paid for by American taxpayers to support Americans in times of disaster they have no control over. Illegals have no claim on this money and the feds have no right to spend it. They seem to think it's their money, and they're using it to pay for Democrat policy aims of importing voters to pad congressional districts as well as replace the electorate with indigents who will always be loyal to them.

But it's not their money, it's the American people's money. Any amount spent on them needs to be paid for or paid back, and if the current leadership can't or won't say where the money is going and why they constantly need extra bailouts, it's time to get them out of there.

Fact is, FEMA aid has long been inadequate if not gone in times of natural disaster affecting Americans in part because of the amount of FEMA cash now being used to feed, transport, and house illegals:

Some $640 million has gone for their care and feeding, while Lahaina's residents, who lost their homes in the flames, had to make due with a piddly $700 a pop, and that was all they were gettin,' as they were subsequently told, to use the language Biden might use.

This disaster is quite a bit bigger, spanning an 800-mile trail of destruction across 10 highly populated states. If FEMA couldn't help the Hawaiians who lost their homes on one small island, how are they going to help the victims of total disaster stretching across that much of the U.S., including isolated towns in places like western North Carolina?

Yet nothing comes before illegals in this Harris-Biden administration. Money that should be spent on natural disaster victims is now going to victims of artificially goosed disasters whose participants had a hand in their own decision to cross into the U.S. illegally on the expectation that they would be handed better benefit packages courtesy of the U.S. taxpayer.

Katrina, anyone?

President Trump, by contrast, is already on the scene, delivering water, fuel, and other aid to the battered city of Valdosta, Georgia, rolling up his sleeves.

Update: There's also this -- just out:

Which one, again, is the selfish one, out for him- or herself, Kamala?

Sure, it's just a little. But private citizen Trump's not the one with his hands on the levers of power, the way Biden and Harris are. He's doing what normal Americans do during times of crisis, getting up and helping out -- and he's interrrupting his campaign to do so.

Harris is just trying to use the crisis to get another photo out there. Never let a crisis go to waste, as Democrat operative Rahm Emanuel used to say.

Image: Twitter screen shot

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