The Hawaii Fires: Another Example of Joe Biden’s Failed Presidency – President Joe Biden is the commander-in-chief who isn’t there.
The man who promised us he’d return the country to normal after former President Donald Trump’s supposed norms-defying time in the White House.
We were told that Biden was saner, stabler, and more compassionate. With Biden, the adults would be back in charge of the White House.
Judging from the last three years of the Biden presidency, that claim was wrong.
What has been astounding to watch has been the way that the mainstream media has covered Biden’s dereliction of duty.
Take, as a most recent example, the way that President Joe Biden has responded (or not responded, depending on how you look at it) to the wildfires in Hawaii.
When the horrific wildfires erupted on Hawaii, President Biden was again vacationing on Rehoboth Beach, Del.
He never once took a moment out of his unbusy schedule to even make note of the tragedy unfolding in America’s fiftieth state.
Instead, Biden left Delaware to head over to the Lake Tahoe home of the billionaire climate change activist, Tom Steyer, on the West Coast.
A Terrible Double-Standard
Joe Biden’s defenders shoot back at critics of Biden that the forty-sixth president has made all federal resources necessary available to Hawaii’s emergency responders as well as the state and all local governments affected by the disaster.
But that’s beside the point.
How many times throughout Trump’s presidency did we hear what were clearly (given how silent they are about Biden’s refusal to acknowledge the disaster in Hawaii) fake lamentations from the media and Democrats about Trump’s heartlessness during national tragedies?
Those same voices are either excusing or ignoring Biden’s own indifference to a terrible tragedy. Hawaii is an overwhelmingly Blue State. Voters there might want to start asking themselves why the party that they have so heavily favored over the years appears to take their votes for granted? Is it because they’re removed from the mainland United States that the Biden Administration merely thinks the plight of the Hawaiian people can be ignored?
What a thing.
Anyway, the Democrats don’t care about the apparent heartlessness that the forty-sixth president is exhibiting by refusing to fully address the wildfires of Hawaii. This is an interesting comparison not only to how the media reacted to presidential responses to various calamities during the Trump years in office, but also during the George W. Bush years as president.
One of the greatest catastrophes of the twenty-first century was the controversy around the Bush Administration’s response to Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans, LA.
At that time, the Democrats and the media used a natural disaster, the hurricane, to decimate President Bush politically because he was their partisan foe.
What was determined long after the disaster in Louisiana was that, while there were failures from the Bush Administration (there almost always are failures from the government in such times of crisis), the main failures around Katrina were from state and local officials.
What’s more, the true damage to New Orleans came not during the storm.
Rather, they occurred after the storm when levees that protected New Orleans from flooding failed.
The Democrats further attacked President Bush for not having the US military on hand.
But as the forty-third president later told the daytime television host, Oprah Winfrey, he was constitutionally forbidden from deploying US military forces in response to the disaster.
Plus, considering that all of New Orleans was a possible flood zone, the Bush Administration was concerned that pre-positioning the military disaster relief forces within New Orleans would just make them susceptible to being flooded out.
None of that mattered to the Left at the time, though. What mattered was hanging the disaster around the man whom they considered to be complete evil (before Donald Trump arose, of course).
An act of nature was refashioned into a political cudgel to wear down whatever support the Republican President Bush might have had. It worked, too. Now that something similar is happening under a Democrat president, Joe Biden, the Republicans cannot seem to get their act together and return the favor.
Joe Biden Doesn’t Care About Hawaii
Meanwhile, nearly 20 years later, as wildfires devastate Hawaii, the Biden Administration is not held to anywhere near the same standard. At least Bush made speeches addressing the crisis in New Orleans during and after Hurricane Katrina.
That didn’t matter at the time, though.
The Democrats wouldn’t let Bush serve as the consoler-in-chief. The opportunity to further divide the country was way too great (domestic division, of course, is the Democratic Party’s number one tool for acquiring power from the Republicans).
President Joe Biden has been persona non grata throughout the crisis. This passes for presidential leadership in America today. The people who have the power to hold Biden accountable—the same people who had no problem holding past Republican presidents, such as Bush and Trump, accountable—are now apparently satisfied with this administration’s approach to the crisis.
The American people (especially Hawaiians) want to hear from their commander-in-chief. They don’t just want federal aid being made available. They want to know that their leadership is on top of things.
Sadly, Biden is only a part-time president. He’s too busy hanging out in elite enclaves, like Rehoboth Beach and in the billionaire, Tom Steyer’s mansion in Lake Tahoe.
The next election can’t come soon enough, if you ask me.
A 19FortyFive Senior Editor, Brandon J. Weichert is a former Congressional staffer and geopolitical analyst who is a contributor at The Washington Times, as well as at American Greatness and the Asia Times. He is the author of Winning Space: How America Remains a Superpower (Republic Book Publishers), Biohacked: China’s Race to Control Life (Encounter Books), and The Shadow War: Iran’s Quest for Supremacy (July 23). Weichert can be followed via Twitter @WeTheBrandon.
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