Morning Reading - The Response We Should Have Had For Puerto Rico

Mark Sumner on the response we should have had for Puerto Rico:

It’s easy to imagine a different kind of response. One that—several days in advance of Hurricane Maria’s arrival, when the forecasts made it clear that Puerto Rico would take a direct hit from a dreadful storm—launched FEMA and the military into high gear. A response where the hospital ship Comfort was loaded up and prepared to go before the storm finished its trek across the island. A response that saw caches of food, fuel, and water distributed across Puerto Rico in anticipation of failing bridges and washed out roads. One that raised the Jones Act in advance of the storm, in order to maximize the arrival of last minute supplies. One that understood generators and satellite phones would be needed to ensure communication. One that searched out  the bottlenecks in delivering supplies to the more remote areas and was ready to address that need with men and machines the moment the winds had passed. 

A response that was about preparation and action, rather than delay and confusion. A response that valued the lives of Americans, over the bragging of Donald Trump. A response like … an American response.

He then repeats Trump's vicious tweet about Puerto Ricans ("They want everything to be done for them when it should be a community effort."), and responds:

This message was delivered to Americans without food, clean water, or electricity from a man at a golf course. Oh, and 10,000 federal workers is almost one-third the number who were on hand in Houston within four days of Hurricane Harvey. How dare the Americans on Puerto Rico expect to be treated like Americans.

We like to call Trump a Man Baby, a nitwit, a pathological liar, a neo- fascist, a white supremacist, etc., and those labels unfortunately all fit.  But above all, he's a narcissistic sociopath who has the lives of all of us, most critically today our Puerto Rican countrymen, in his tiny hands. That cannot stand.