Donald Trump's visit to Puerto Rico was a "disaster," showing he has no ability to care about other and their difficulties IN SPADES. The man is a dolt. Tweety was more concerned about NFL Players kneeling during the national Anthem, itself a protest song, than the dead in Puerto Rico.
As David Frum wrote in TheAtlantic.com, "The 45th president . . . is not a great builder, not a great deal maker, not a billionaire, not a man of strength and decisiveness." Tweety is a coward, in fact. His worst trait among many ugly traits, is his inability concern for others, he cannot pretend or show concern any real care or compassion, and does not even try to do so.
"The New Estimate of Deaths in Puerto Rico Reflects a Broader and Shameful Neglect"
By Amy Davidson Sorkin May 31, 2018
If it bleeds, it leads is how the media covers events. The 24 hour "news cycle" in American media has forgotten the need for disaster relief in Puerto Rico. "Bigger" stories jump in front of the disaster report for Puerto Rico story, like lava in Hawaii and Border Patrol "Nazis" taking immigrant kids from "illegal" immigrants. Then the "Jack Boot" thugs take months (MONTHS!) to return these traumatized kids (including toddlers!) to their "criminal" parents when the slow "legal" (nothing to do with JUSTICE) proceedings are complete.
Brown people in Puerto Rico might as well move to Florida as soon as they can.
"After Hurricane Maria struck Puerto Rico, last September 20th, leaving three and a half million Americans without power, clean water, or access to medical care, President Donald Trump publicly suggested that maybe, for people like them, the situation was kind of normal. The island “was already suffering from broken infrastructure”; the electrical grid was already in “terrible shape”; the government was in debt, the leaders didn’t know how to lead, and its truck drivers had to be exhorted even to show up for their jobs. Even as Puerto Rico slipped into a blackout that lasted, in parts of the island, for months—and, last month, again engulfed it almost entirely, after some post-hurricane repairs went wrong—Trump said, “They want everything to be done for them.” The implication was that these Americans were trying to turn images of their ordinary poverty into a special bonus, all because of a little rain and wind."
Tweety expressed his typically harsh, racist, "White Man" sentiments and the media did a poor job showing and describing the truth that Puerto Rico had too few resources to recover from such a disaster.
Tweety even made light of the number of deaths!
"That stance—that disdain—is one of the reasons why a new report on the number of deaths in Puerto Rico attributable to Maria, led by researchers at Harvard’s T. H. Chan School of Public Health and published, this week, in The New England Journal of Medicine, is so crucial. It should be a source of shame for everyone who got tired of thinking about Puerto Rico—perhaps especially, but not only, the President. The researchers’ approach was, precisely, to try to determine what was normal in Puerto Rico, in terms of the number of deaths in a three-month period, and to compare that figure to the numbers in the storm’s wake. They found that there were four thousand six hundred and sixty-five excess deaths."
Is some conservative going to say "excess" is not well defined? The fact is there is no easy way to count dead people, but dear God why can't we have some compassion for the 64 "official" and a likelihood many more dead were not counted?
Are we a just and moral country, or has America regressed into the lawless days of slaughter-without-conscience of our native American Indiana slaughter?
"“We calculated a 62% increase in the mortality rate from September 20 through December 31 in 2017 as compared with the same period in 2016, corresponding to an annual mortality rate of 14.3 deaths” per thousand residents, the researchers wrote. And they added that that number might actually be conservative, because of their methodology: they also relied on household surveys, conducted between January 17th and February 24th of this year, and “we could not survey single-person households in which a death had occurred.” That is, if a person living alone had died in the darkness of the storm, that death would remain obscure."
America's disgrace under Tweety will not be fully known for years after he leaves office, but his administration's sins against Puerto Rico will be part of Tweety's ugly, insane legacy.
"Other analyses, based on incomplete official data—which the Puerto Rican government has said it is reviewing and, according to the Harvard researchers, has, in part, declined to share—have put the total at more than a thousand deaths. Rick Scott, the governor of Florida, who is running for a seat in the U.S. Senate, visited Puerto Rico this week—Florida has many voters who care about the island. When he was asked if he thought that the Harvard numbers were reliable, he said, according to the Tampa Bay Times, “Whatever the number is, it’s—I mean, you just—you know, it’s horrible.” That’s true enough, but what the real number is, and what contributed to it, matters. There are other studies underway; every lost American deserved to be counted."
Yes, the Americans who died in Puerto Rico deserve to be counted. The Amricans who live in Puerto Rico deserve the help all Americans get when help is needed too.
"Among the more devastating statements in the report, in a quiet way, is this one: “Our estimates are roughly consistent with press reports that evaluated deaths in the first month after the hurricane.” That is, they matched the stories in the media—the interviews, the footage—about what was happening on the ground. Similarly, the Harvard report notes that the deaths from a lack of medical care are “consistent with the widely reported disruption of health systems.” And again: “Many survey respondents were still without water and electricity at the time of sampling, a finding consistent with other reports.” And yet we somehow suppose that those same estimates come, now, as a shock. We saw the pictures; we heard the reports. What did we think they added up to? Not to sixty-four; not to the grade that Trump said that he would give his Administration’s response, on a scale of one to ten: “I’d say it was a ten.” The shocking thing is that we can still pretend to be surprised."
We want to feel like we did not know, but how could we not know of the extent of personal injury to people living in Puerto Rico? Did we hope we could wish the tragedy was not true, and hope the people of Puerto Rico got lucky?
Well, the people did not get lucky and many died because of slow delivery or interrupted delivery of help, PERIOD.
