Back to Basics

Rapid response photo ops

This just in from the “How many nightly newscasts would lead with this story if Bush were president” department:

I was fortunate enough to be in the pool of news photographers who accompanied the president on his tour of the devastation along the Jersey Shore, and among those who got to photograph [Donna] Vanzant’s presidential encounter.

I returned to Brigantine last week to see how she was doing.
[...]
Vanzant has been moved by the many kindnesses she received from friends, family and customers. She heard from countless people after the photograph of her hug with the president was published, including from strangers as far away as Vietnam who wished her well.

She said she was honored to meet Obama, but she is also frustrated that she has yet to receive help from either her insurance companies or the government. “The president told me I would get immediate help,” she said.

“Looking back on it, it wasted a lot of people’s time,” she said of the visit.

It’s getting so you can’t take a politician who shows up at the site of a natural disaster and makes promises shortly before a national election completely at his word anymore. In spite of what Ms. Vanzant might think, the president’s visit certainly wasn’t a “waste of people’s time” from the perspective of Team Obama. No word yet on if Jamie Foxx plans to accuse Vanzant of blasphemy over this bit of criticism.

Take note of who Vanzant says has been there for her so far, and who hasn’t, and then give another read to the New York Times’ post-Sandy editorial “Big storm requires big government.”

The original story and a photograph are still featured on the White House website.

(h/t Weasel Zippers)

On Sunday, Joe Biden was in New Jersey touring damage from Hurricane Sandy. Fully aware that the Disaster Response 101 manual calls for 70 year old men to use late 20th century street slang to calm nerves during any emergency, Plugs reminded those still affected by the storm that they can count on their homeboy:

“If you’re not an Easterner it’s hard to understand that the ocean to us is the Grand Canyon, Yellowstone Park and everything else combined. It is a gigantic part of not only our economy but who we are. It’s a gigantic part of the culture as well.

“And every time the rest of the country is in real trouble, New Jersey and Delaware and New York and Connecticut, et cetera, we respond, we respond. And it’s going to be a heavy lift. These are difficult times in terms of budgets but the president has made it clear that we are going to do everything we can to make sure that the Corps is fully funded, that FEMA has their needs and that all the programs that exist under the auspices of the federal government not only continue to exist but are funded so that we can make sure that this area of the country is fully fully fully restored.

“So as the president said when he was up here with the governor, we’re not going anywhere. We’re not going anywhere. And you’ve got a homeboy in the deal who gets it.”

Some think the “homeboy” Biden was referring to was Barack Obama, and others believe he was talking about himself. Either way, as usual, it was a cry for psychological help while the struggle continues for thousands and thousands of people.

Rumor has it that Biden was spotted selling these t-shirts just after his address, so it all makes a little more sense now:

Hurricane Sandy — much like Barack Obama — turned out to be an over–hyped phenomenon that failed to deliver. Our portion of the storm in Northern Virginia was so weak the Multicultural Commissars didn’t even bother to give it a Hispanic name, like last summer’s “derecho” (formerly known as “severe thunderstorm”).

I tried to lend a hand and come up with a culturally–sensitive name, but Spanish for “Sandy” is still “Sandy,” making it tough to appear cutting edge during a TV broadcast.

“Hurricane” translates as “huracán” and the resulting “Huracán Sandy” fails to advance the cause of linguistic arrogance. It doesn’t compare with changing the perfectly good name of “Bombay” to “Mumbai.” All that did was confuse millions of Americans looking for a particular large city in India. (The Indians already knew where it was.)

Besides, where does one draw the line? Does the “pecan sandie” cookie become the “sandie pacana?”

There were houses smashed by downed trees in my neighborhood — certainly a disaster for the affected homeowners — but nothing to compare with the “derecho.”

Even during the height of the hype, my household preparations were limited to bracing for a potential power outage. Since our family has never associated bowel movements with natural disasters, we even missed the ‘Assault on Food Lion.’ Because we don’t feel compelled to buy a pallet–load of toilet paper anytime it’s overcast for three consecutive days.

The local paper wrote of a Dominion Power repairman that just missed being drowned by rising floodwaters. But who noticed the unsung American Disposal Services crews braving wind and rain to pick up household trash during the beginning of the blow? While government employees, enjoying the shutdown, watched from their front window.

Naturally Obama’s media amen chorus and the administration itself, are doing their best to politicize the storm. There was extensive damage in New Jersey and New York. So the WaPost proclaims, “Storm provides Obama with a commander–in–chief moment.” Which only goes to show the mainstream media (MSM) thinks we’ll believe anything.

The attack on the consulate in Libya provided Obama with a genuine “commander–in–chief” moment where he could have affected events on the ground, which is something “commanders” do. But Obama failed miserably.

Hurricane Sandy provides him with a Social–Worker–in–Chief moment, a situation with which community organizers are much more comfortable. Obama took a helicopter tour while the wind was still blowing. Yet FBI investigators had to wait weeks before they could visit the ruined consulate in Libya, only to discover the scene hopelessly compromised by hundreds of journalists and sightseers who didn’t wait for administration approval.

And to show benighted conservatives how fortunate we are to have Obama in the White House, the WaPost adds: “Rarely, if ever, has a president had to deal with such a major disaster so close to Election Day…”

What’s “rare” — in fact unprecedented — is the MSM allowing an administration to take a bye on a disaster like Libya so close to an election. Governors in New York and New Jersey call Obama for help and he’s Johnny–on–the–spot. SEALs in Libya call for backup during an attack that kills four Americans, including the ambassador, and get an administration brush off.

If only Libya had a few more votes in the Electoral College.

In Union Square the chess players sit alone under the statue of George Washington waiting for a game. A Latino family, father, mother and son, sit on the sidewalk holding cardboard signs and singing. “I’ll be your friend, when you’re not strong.”  The big chain stores are closed but the bodegas are open and Muslim and Chinese storekeepers charge up to ten dollars for a gallon of water. New York City in blackout, in short, is much like New York City as usual.

The electronics stores are closed and the wine stores are open. A chalk sign outside one darkened store reads, “Screw electricity.”  NYU students crowd the bus stops and French tourists elbow their way through the crowd on the way to a cheaply expensive hotel. A massive ancient tree lies torn out of the earth in the old 16^th Street park and residents crowd around sticking their iPhones through the 19^th Century ironwork of the shuttered park to get a photo. A photo of devastation.

Recording disaster has become instinct. I saw dozens of people taking photos on September 11 and the number would have increased by a factor of x10 If the modern smartphone with its 8 megapixel camera had been present in 2001. A click of a touchscreen and the photo is uploaded to Facebook to be shared around the world with people who like gawking at broken things.

The departure of the internet accompanies the return of drive time news radio and the shocking reminder of what the media is really like. On WINS a cheerful male anchor runs through the list of catastrophes. “Gone in Sixty Seconds,” he says about a flooded town, almost chuckling at the joke. “The town of Little Ferry sure lived up to its name,” he says of another.  The obscenities repeat themselves every 10 minutes intersecting with audio clips of survivors who only have a few seconds to mention the water or how much they lost before the whole things cut to a commercial.

With a million Con Edison customers out of power, the commercial is naturally for Con Edison, but it isn’t one of those, “We’re working as hard as we can” ads that utilities run while their customers curse them in the dark, instead it’s an ad touting Con Edison’s Diversity Supplier Program which distributes supplier contracts based on race, instead of competence. Even liberals would not have been reassured by the timing.

Chris Christie is everywhere, flying around in the helicopter and landing just long enough to survey the destruction. A few minutes later he is launching into an anecdote about jet skiers rescuing 80 year old ladies on jet skis. “All they wanted was a photo with me and then they were off,” he says, reminding the audience that while the governor is trying to be the Rudy Guiliani of this news cycle, he isn’t Rudy.

While shopping for supplies, Senator Schumer comes on the radio and in his best oily voice, informs beleaguered shoppers that he has gotten calls from Republicans and Democrats and assures us that this issue will not be politicized. Unlike Hurricane Katrina, an unseen heckler supplies in the rugs and mops aisle.

What major weather events and especially earthquakes tell us is that we live on planet Earth on its terms, not ours. Put another way, we don’t “control” the weather or climate and, despite decades of global warming lies, compared to the sun and oceans, we don’t even influence it.

The best definition of the weather is “chaos.” It will do whatever it wants to do.

By Friday on Fox News and other television news outlets, it was non-stop coverage of Hurricane Irene even though it was barely beginning to touch the North Carolina coast. If there is one thing the news media loves it is a really big potential disaster.

By Saturday afternoon as Irene passed over North Carolina, Anthony Watts, a veteran meteorologist and commentator on WattsUpWithThat.com, was reporting, “What we have here at this point appears to be a tropical storm. By the time it reaches New York, it may very well just be a tropical depression on par with a Nor’easter in intensity.” But not a hurricane.

At one point late Saturday, I clicked the remote on every local channel and on every cable news channel. Every single one was reporting on the hurricane. According to my blogger pal, Texas Fred, that’s a “newsgasm”.

By Sunday morning, the drenching rain, but no high winds, was already moving north out of New York City and northern New Jersey where I live.

The incessant “news” coverage reflects the way television (and print) news professionals tend to regard viewers as too stupid to make decisions as basic as preparing for the hurricane or evacuating before its arrival, nor do they just report the news, i.e., the facts. So far as Irene was concerned, they engaged in massive speculation and endless predictions.

In the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina FEMA (Federal Emergency Management Agency) became an acronym for incompetence. Presumably lessons have been learned and the agency will perform more effectively if needed.

Americans have been taught that the federal government will always come to their rescue and it rarely does with any efficiency and usually with a great waste of money and resources. Local first responders are usually the best and most reliable.

In a society that is utterly and completely dependent on electricity to function, it is always a sobering experience for many to discover how useless every single appliance in their home or apartment becomes without it.

I am sure I am boring people to death by repeatedly pointing to the way government at the federal and state level, along with many environmental organizations are deliberately making it difficult, if not impossible, to build coal-burning or nuclear utilities. As for transportation, the same forces are allied against any oil exploration and extraction. There hasn’t been a single new oil refinery built since the 1970s. That’s insane.

Now they are gearing up to deter natural gas extraction using “fracking” even though this technology has been in safe use for fifty years. The discovery of vast new reserves of natural gas should be greeted as welcome news by everyone. Only the luddites want us to return to mythical “simpler” times that never existed. It is still easier and a whole lot faster to take the train from New York to Washington, D.C. than to ride a horse.

This morning while flipping between CNN, Fox News and some of the network shows, there was a collective media letdown as predictions were revised downward to match the reality of a storm that was incapable of matching the apocalyptic hype:

There was almost palpable disappointment among the TV big guns rolled out for the occasion when Irene was downgraded to a mere ‘tropical storm”. In New York city, CNN’s silver-haired Anderson Cooper, more usually seen in a tight t-shirt in a famine or war zone, was clad in what one wag dubbed “disaster casual”.

He looked crestfallen fell briefly silent when a weatherwoman told him that the rain was not going to get any worse. “Wow, because this isn’t so bad,” he said. “It’s an annoying rain but it isn’t even a sideways rain.”
[...]
For politicians, Irene was a chance to either make amends or appear in control. The White House sent out 25 Irene emails to the press on Saturday alone.

There were photographs of President Barack Obama touring disaster centres and footage of him asking sombre, pertinent questions. With his poll ratings plummeting, Obama needed to project an aura of seriousness and command. He was all too aware that the political fortunes of his predecessor George W. Bush never recovered after the Hurricane Katrina disaster of 2005.

The press mostly reported the message the White House had carefully crafted: “Obama takes charge” read the headline of one wire service story.

When it hit the Jersey shore, Irene unfortunately wasn’t even powerful enough to wash Snooki out to sea.

That said, the storm wasn’t nothing — people died and there will be billions of dollars of damage — but the real danger in over-hyping is that the next time it might be the real deal, and fewer people will pay attention.

We’ll see what the damage from this ends up being, but I for one slept better last night knowing that Chief Meteorologist Obama was on the job.

Al Gore is going to be very busy pulling the puppet strings on his AGW bots all day:

Hurricane Irene hadn’t even made landfall in the United States before some people figured out what to blame it on.

“Irene’s got a middle name, and it’s Global Warming,” environmental activist Bill McKibben wrote Thursday night in The Daily Beast. He argued that this year’s hot Atlantic Ocean temperatures and active spree of hurricanes — coupled with droughts, floods and melting sea ice elsewhere on the globe — are “what climate change looks like in its early stages.”

Besides, “what’s a ‘tropical’ storm doing heading for the snow belt?” asked McKibben. He also said the storm represented bad timing for the Obama administration’s favorable environmental impact statement on TransCanada’s proposed Keystone XL pipeline, which environmentalists label a danger to the Earth’s climate.

These people really are self parodies.

What’s a tropical storm doing heading for the snow belt? I don’t know… what was one doing heading for the snow belt over 70 years ago?

New York City and Long Island have been hit by nine previous hurricanes from 1858 to 1991, according to NOAA records, including the disastrous 1938 storm known as the Long Island Express. And the deadliest hurricane in U.S. history struck 111 years ago — the 1900 storm that killed an estimated 8,000 people in Galveston, Texas.

In other global warming news, Al Gore wants you to give up your meaty diet — probably so there’s more left for him. Yeah, when you look at Jabba the Nut the first thing you think is “vegan.” Oh, and if you don’t agree with Al Gore, you’re also a racist… or something. That from the guy whose father voted against the Civil Rights Act of 1964?

Will this fraud ever go away?

As for Hurricane Irene, I see Janet Napolitano on TV now, so if you’re in the path of the storm and are comforted by that fact, you don’t know nearly enough about J-Nap.

Update: The hurricane is also caused by Republicans — but that goes without saying, since Republicans cause global warming.