Programming note: Tomorrow, Wednesday, I'll be here for our midweek Clubland Q&A taking questions from Mark Steyn Club members live around the planet at 3pm North American Eastern - which is 8pm British Summer Time/9pm Central European. Hope you can swing by.
~Over a week ago now, I summed up the US Government's "response" to Hurricane Helene thus:
'Government for the people'? Government for everybody but the people.
From The New York Times... The Washington Post... The Boston Globe... ah, here we are, London's Daily Mail, because the only interesting news about America has to be found in the non-American press:
Grieving families in North Carolina have been forced to bury their dead in their backyards - and are accusing authorities of downplaying the damage caused by Hurricane Helene...
Many bodies haven't even been recovered amid debris and flooding. There are also piles of deceased people who have yet to be identified. They are being transported all over the state in hopes of finding open morgue space.
Just to remind you, Hurricane Helene made landfall on September 26th. It is now October 8th. In the intervening days, the most senior figures in Washington have been tweeting up a storm about the "increasingly dire humanitarian situation" in
...North Carolina? East Tennessee?
Ha! Lebanon, of course.
Eight days ago, Politico was tutting:
Trump drags Hurricane Helene into 2024 campaign
Because there's nothing political about a hurricane: you can ask George W Bush.
A week later, Politico is dragging Hurricane Helene into the 2024 campaign - but in a good way:
Helene hit Trump strongholds in Georgia and North Carolina. It could swing the election.
That's to say, if the road to the polling station got washed away, it might depress turnout, no? Which may be why FEMA is taking the same general approach to western North Carolina as the Wehrmacht did to Leningrad in the autumn of 1941: Nobody gets in; nobody gets out.
So volunteers arriving in trucks full of supplies at help centres are being told to turn around and drive them back where they came from because FEMA is busy conducting an "inventory". When will this inventory be completed? Oh, just a wild guesstimate, maybe November 5th, round about 7pm... A Tennessee state senator is said to have witnessed people having their chainsaws confiscated by FEMA agents, there being no right to bear chainsaws apparently.
Oh, wait, we have breaking news of Homeland Security honcho Alejandro Mayorkas (whose department controls FEMA) direct from the White House situation room.
Oops, sorry, my mistake. Secretary Mayorkas is not in the situation room but is out shopping at a high-end menswear store in Georgetown:
Appalachia has gone dark and criminals are pouring over the border but the Homeland Security chief had time to go luxury shopping https://t.co/Wi4108dDpM
— Not the Bee (@Not_the_Bee) October 6, 2024
Mayorkas's cabinet colleague Pete Buttigeig isn't shopping - unless it's for a working telephone:
I see we've reached the stage of civilizational decline where the sclerotic federal bureaucracy is hamstringing the tech billionaire's effort to run private disaster relief in the face of government inaction while trapped civilians run out of food and water... https://t.co/9QSXZBIavy
— John Daniel Davidson (@johnddavidson) October 4, 2024
I note the state police in North Carolina are now threatening to arrest any FEMA employee found turning away humanitarian aid. The good news is that volunteers have found a workaround - or, actually, a walkaround, avoiding the gauleiters of the federal government, by hiking deep into the woods and delivering their FEMA-forbidden hurricane relief sotto voce:
See my $800 belt.
— X Citizen Journal (@xcitizenjournal) October 6, 2024
Brat brat brat pic.twitter.com/SdAMUlppDI
The above tweet is correct: If you are approved by FEMA, you will receive $750 - which is twenty bucks less than the cost of Kamala's belt. You may, however, have enough quarters down the back of the couch to make up the difference and order it anyway, in case you need to hang yourself because it's February and the FEMA aid-blockade has tightened.
What is the point of the United States Government? The federal debt, a whisker over $10 trillion when I published After America thirteen years ago, is now at $36 tril - or just shy of three hundred grand per taxpayer. Year on year, Washington breezily runs $2 trillion budget deficits. According to the CBO, federal debt held by the public is equivalent to 99 per cent of GDP, projected to rise to 172 per cent of GDP by 2054.
But don't worry about that last one: on those numbers, there isn't going to be a United States of America in 2054.
What do Americans have to show for letting the political class burn through all the dough? It would be unreasonable perhaps to expect a sclerotic pseudo-republic to build a Hoover Dam or Golden Gate Bridge, but you would think they'd be flush enough to operate a Department of Processing Lousy Three-Figure Hurricane Relief Payments Reasonably Efficiently.
Where did all the greenbacks go? Another beach house for Zelenskyyyyy? More gender-reassignments for Guatemalan gangbangers?
10/6/24
Randomly landed in this area where the fire station is gone, houses no longer line the creek, roads are completely gone, bridge is split in two, and active search and rescue were taking place. Told power would take 4-5 months.
We noticed no cell service so we were able... pic.twitter.com/1a0x4KIRkx
— Greg Biffle (@gbiffle) October 6, 2024
And another:
Tim Kennedy on FEMA: 'They are directly interrupting our ability to conduct missions'
"I went to put a couple of people into a hotel last night, and they have a security guard at the hotel and they said, 'Oh, we're so sorry. The entire hotel has been booked for federal... pic.twitter.com/6IV8Xg2gPe
— Mr Commonsense (@fopminui) October 7, 2024
Do you recall the Indian Ocean tsunami of 2004? It struck on Boxing Day, spreading devastation across the region, but nowhere more than the province of Aceh on the Sumatran coast. One hundred and seventy thousand people died within minutes, another half-million were rendered homeless, sixty per cent of buildings in the capital city were destroyed, and the local government collapsed.
Yet, notwithstanding a potholed runway that had never dealt with more than eight flights a day, within less than forty-eight hours (December 28th) planes from the Royal Australian Air Force, the Royal New Zealand Air Force and the Singapore Air Force were on the ground helping to restore some semblance of order. A couple of days later, a diverted US carrier group arrived. As I wrote twenty years ago:
One of the heartening aspects of the situation is how easy it is to make a difference. By the weekend, the Australians had managed not just to restore the water supply in Aceh, but to improve it. Even before the tsunami, most residents of the city boiled their water. But ten army engineers from Darwin have managed to crack open the main lines and hook them up to a mobile filtration unit.
So the United States can get a carrier group to Sumatra in four days. Yet we are expected to believe that the most powerful and lavish government on earth cannot do anything for its own people a mere four hundred miles, a ninety-minute flight, from the diseased and depraved capital city?
No, sir. That is a choice.
As in Banda Aceh, there are heartening tales from the wreckage. There always are:
We say grace.
— Ryan McCubbin (@RyanMcCubbinTX) October 6, 2024
We say ma'am. pic.twitter.com/8Tn7uTckJh
But what is entirely absent, after a week-and-a-half, is any sense from Washington that their supposed fellow Americans matter at all - never mind matter as much as Ukrainian kleptocrats or Rio Grande human-trafficking cartels or MS-13 welfare recipients.
I am inclined to agree with this assessment:
The government is now a criminal organization. Like all criminal organizations, protecting itself is the highest goal.
So the FBI looks out for the FBI.
— Jesse Kelly (@JesseKellyDC) October 6, 2024
FEMA worries only about FEMA.
Secret Service about the Secret Service. https://t.co/gHDAFPUeww
So Mayorkas shops for new boots, the better to walk all over you.
And, if it suits the regime's interests that you be left to die, then so be it. In another month or so, FEMA will be ready with a pamphlet on how to bury your kid in the yard in accordance with federal regulations.
~We thank you for all your kind comments these last grisly few months - and thank you especially to all those new members of The Mark Steyn Club, and those old members who've signed up a chum for a SteynOnline Gift Certificate or a Steyn Club Gift Membership. Steyn Clubbers span the globe, from London, Ontario to London, England to London, Kiribati. We hope to welcome many more new members in the years ahead.
