The seputuagenerian tween in the White House broke his Twitter silence to write some mealy-mouthed endorsements of congressional candidates, remind the country that there’s no collusion and in the midst of tropical depression Florence, retweet some alleged praise from the FEMA chief, Brock Long.
Two observations.
First off: What does that sentence even mean? ‘We have never had the support that we have had from this President.’
Does that mean, that from this President, you don’t have the support that you have had? Because that would mean that the President is letting you down by not providing the support that this President previously had provided.
Secondly: It’s likely that Brock Long never wrote or said that. That quote—as a direct quote—is most likely a lie.
Whomever is in charge of today’s tweets from the White House bunker, does not seem to realize that you’re supposed to use single quotes when you are paraphrasing (or lying), not double quotes, since that signifies a direct quote.
At the moment, nobody on Twitter has been able to find this alleged FEMA praise on FEMA’s timeline or as a direct quote from Brock Long.
So it’s another lie. Not exactly breaking news.
What the lie is likely referring to is something Brock Long said in an astoundingly idiotic, self-serving interview that he had on Face the Nation:
Long praised the president for his support for FEMA, including the ongoing response in North and South Carolina, where Florence continues to churn. "One thing about President Trump is that he is probably the one president that has had more support for what goes on back here. And I think he's defensive because he knows how hard these guys behind me work day in and day out for a very complex situation."
That limp praise somehow became the fake re-tweet “We (@FEMA) have never had the support that we have had from this President.” Administrator @FEMA_Brock
And as has been pointed out, Brock has only worked for Trump, so his comparison credibility is non-existent.
During the Face the Nation interview Brock dismisses the post-hurricane death toll estimates in Puerto Rico—2,975 deaths according to George Washington University study and 4,645 according to a Harvard University study--as “being all over the place.”
And he doesn’t know why the estimates were commissioned at all.
“I don’t know why the studies were done," Long said when asked about Trump's claims that the study was "done by Democrats in order to make me look as bad as possible."
"What we’ve got to do is figure out why people die from direct deaths, which is the wind, the water and the waves, buildings collapsing," Long said.
"The numbers are all over the place. FEMA doesn't count deaths. And if you take what's going on with Florence, the deaths that are verified by the local county coroners are the ones that we take."
The reason the commissions were done is because the current administration cannot be counted on to provide an accurate count.
First they claimed 16 deaths and then 64 deaths total, in the wake of one of the hardest-hitting hurricanes this century.
And the study was not commissioned by Democrats. It was commissioned by the government of Puerto Rico.
There is one thing about which Brock is certain. That hurricanes are not responsible for spousal abuse.
"You might see more deaths indirectly occur as time goes on because people have heart attacks due to stress, they fall off their house trying to fix their roof, they die in car crashes because they went through an intersection where the stoplights weren’t working," he said.
He went on to add that the agency looks at "all kinds of studies," noting that while spousal abuse rates go up after disasters, "you can't blame spousal abuse after a disaster on anybody."
An indirect death is still a death.
And some of those deaths were preventable.
NPR's Ailsa Chang speaks with Satchit Balsari, a research fellow at Harvard Medical School and the T.H. Chan School of Public Health about his estimate of Puerto Rico's death toll following Hurricane Maria and recommendations for preparedness.[...]
BALSARI: Well, it is important to understand how many people died because you want to be able to quantify the impact. You want to know not only how many people died but what they died of, what they died from so that preparedness efforts can be directed towards mitigating the factors that caused those deaths. What our study showed is that many of those later deaths - right? - we're not talking about people that died in the immediate aftermath from something falling on them or being electrocuted or drowning, but we're talking about a prolonged tale of sustained deaths that happened because of interrupted medical care.
CHANG: And what kind of interruptions? What kind of failures happened long after the storm was over?
BALSARI: The majority of those people that reported they had some kind of delayed access to care in our study come up with a variety of factors, not all unique. It was often just difficulty getting medicines, right? They ran out of medications and were unable to procure medications, unable to use their respiratory equipment at home because of the prolonged absence of electricity, a lack of access to water, unable to reach clinics, or their clinics were shut, or the doctors weren't there and so on and so forth. You know, this is a pattern that we have seen in disasters around the world but certainly in the U.S., certainly in Hurricane Sandy as well.
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