Because they are there for him, and he has come to praise Trump, not to bury his ego beneath the dignity of his office. And because he is not just a national embarrassment, but an international one:.@realDonaldTrump First Lady Melania Trump greet supporters as they arrive in Johnstown, PA to attend the Flight 93 September 11 Memorial Service in Shanksville, PA pic.twitter.com/SRMBvlDLKJ— Doug Mills (@dougmillsnyt) September 11, 2018
Maria, he said, was the "hardest one we had by far because of the island nature", adding: "I actually think it was one of the best jobs that's ever been done with respect to what this is all about.
"The job that Fema [the Federal Emergency Management Agency] and law enforcement and everybody did working along with the governor in Puerto Rico, I think was tremendous. I think that Puerto Rico was an incredible, unsung success."
Success? Federal response according to Trump in Puerto Rico a success? If he thinks the death of 3,000 people os a success God help us all.— Carmen Yulín Cruz (@CarmenYulinCruz) September 11, 2018
And while we're on the subject of hurricanes:
Senator Jeff Merkley talks with @maddow about a document showing that the Trump administration took close to ten million dollars from FEMA's budget ahead of the 2018 hurricane season and gave it to ICE to pay for detentions. https://t.co/q0sNTcKxQ1— MSNBC (@MSNBC) September 12, 2018
Wildly off topic, but maybe of interest. I was reading a very interesting review at the online magazine The Point on a book about Christian thinkers in 1943. The year 1943 was picked by the author because W. H. Auden, T. S. Eliot, C. S. Lewis, Jacques Maritain and Simone Weil were all writing and teaching at the time on the future of Christianity. A couple of quotes really jumped out "[T]he older figures (Maritain, Eliot, Lewis) tend to believe, or at least hope, that it’s possible to rebuild and renew Christendom—to have a Western European society that is grounded in Christian tradition, though without any mandated acceptance of Christianity." and "[T]he younger figures, Auden and Weil, the ship of Christendom has sailed; for them, the chief question is the place that Christian ideas can find in societies that structurally reject them.". There is also this wonderful Neibuhr embedded quote "the war was won, and was widely understood to have been won not by thinkers gathered in rooms to talk, but by “problem solvers” who built the machines that crushed the Axis machines. This is part of what Reinhold Niebuhr was concerned with when he warned against the dangers of “winning the war but losing the peace”: allowing the imperatives of technological superiority unrestrained power in ways that would become difficult to reverse, or even to critique, once the war was over." It's great foresight, here we are 65 years on waiting for technology to fix our ills (the web will fix this, Facebook will solve these problems, venerate Elon Musk and his technology to eliminate our problems!!) A number of themes that rise in the interview are ones that regularly appear here. Now I need to go order the book.
ReplyDeleteHell, now so do I! I'm a student of both Eliot and Auden, as well as Niebuhr, yet the explicit connections mentioned here hadn't occurred to me (but are now very clear).
ReplyDeleteIt's not unconnected to what Bacevich has said, or says in the post I just put up; or what Wendell Berry was on about immediately after 9/11 (which is in my archives somewhere!).
Thanks for that.