RUSH: One of the things that… You know, Trump yesterday was talking about how great the United States response was to the hurricane in Puerto Rico. The media’s outraged. The media can’t stand it! The media’s livid! “How dare Trump say that our response was magnificent!” It was, and so was our response to Hurricane Katrina! Despite all the conventions. You know what’s been found in Puerto Rico?
A massive stockpile of bottled water has been found one year after Hurricane Maria there. Hundreds of thousands of water bottles meant for victims of Hurricane Maria are still sitting at a Puerto Rico airport nearly a year after the storm, and there are photos showing the bottles in boxes covered on a blue tarp on a runway. You may have seen these photos ’cause they’re all over social media. Now, how does that happen? Trump doesn’t squander that water. We sent that water.
Why was the water not distributed to the victims of the hurricane? We didn’t “not distribute it.” Then you’ve got the governor, mayor whatever of San Juan running around talking about how despicable Trump is, what an idiot Trump is. Would these people go so far as to hide hundreds of thousands of bottles of water from their own people just to make Trump look bad? And the answer is “yes,” folks. The answer is “yes.” It is an unreal thing.
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RUSH: I went back to the archives. Just a couple more things here on this environmental stuff, and if I want to, I’ve got some sound bites on the controversy that the Drive-Bys are trying to rekindle on Puerto Rico. It is amazing! We have a hurricane that’s about to hit. Let me just tell you, this new track — and this is a very tough thing to say because it’s subjective. But this new track with this hurricane making a turn to the southwest means that it has the potential for being much more destructive to many more highly populated areas.
You know, you don’t want to… We here in Florida like, for example, when a hurricane’s headed our way and turns on the way up to Jacksonville, we quietly give thanks. Not that we want the people of Jacksonville to suffer; it’s just human nature. Well, this thing was originally going to split the state of North Carolina, which would blow up the coast, do great damage in Charlotte and the Raleigh-Durham area and then keep on going. But now it’s forecast to hug the coast a little bit on a southwestern turn.
It’s a Category 4. It’s still offshore North Carolina around Wrightsville City, Wrightsville Beach, then it makes the turn, according to the forecast path, becomes a hurricane Category 3 before it forecast to strike South Carolina now. But now that brings Charleston into the picture. It’s such a big storm that the damage area is going to be very much widespread. So there is a potential catastrophe here, and the Drive-By Media is focused on making sure everybody blames it on Donald Trump. It’s beyond rational comprehension.
It seems like everybody on the left literally is having their brain cells eaten away by some disease. Some poison is driving them crazy, that the fundamental objective with this storm is to see to it that as many people as possible end up blaming Donald Trump for it. So in service of that narrative, they have resurfaced the Puerto Rico hurricane, and they’re doing a little revisionist history to talk about how bad it was and how lame the Trump response was to it because Trump didn’t care. It’s Puerto Rico!
(whispering) “They’re people of color who live there, don’t you know, and so Trump? He didn’t care!” Now we find out that officials there literally squandered hundreds of thousands of bottles of water rather than distribute them to people who needed it! For political reasons! There could be no other reason for this. And just to illustrate here, all of this has become just despicably politicized. I went back, I found an Investor’s Business Daily. It’s an editorial, and it is from July 12th.
The editorial here had to deal with a factual news story. That is that CO2 levels in the United States had significantly dropped for the second measurement in a row. Now, CO2 are greenhouse gases, and greenhouse gases are responsible for — dadelut dadelut dadelut dadelut dadelut — climate change, global warming, destruction, end of mankind and all that. Okay? And we are, according to these people, the No. 1 polluter.
We represent the greatest threat to the survivability of the planet and the people who live on it, the United States and our evil capitalist system. Yet our CO2 levels plummeted two measurements in a row, two time periods in a row. The Investor’s Business Daily editorial: “U.S. CO2 Levels Drop Again — So Why Aren’t [Environmental] Groups Rejoicing?” This has always amazed me about these people.
“Once more, science provides bad news for global warming alarmists. U.S. CO2 levels again declined during 2017, despite overall global output again rising.” CO2 levels around the world are up but in the United States down two years in a row, 2016, 2017. You know why? Fracking. Fracking and the national gas boom. Oh, and you know we have become the world’s No. 1 oil exporter, not Saudi Arabia? Now, I could understand that ticking ’em off. But here are people who have been defeating their lives… Now, follow me on this.
We have environmentalist wackos and so forth been devoting their lives to reducing CO2, to race the greenhouse effect, to save planet! And it’s happening! And they’re not happy! Why aren’t they happy? Why aren’t they out claiming credit for it? Why aren’t they out claiming that all of their badgering and all of their demands on business and individuals are succeeding? Why aren’t they doing that? Wouldn’t you think, if you had a pet cause and you’d been making hell about it for years and years and years and finally you get good news…?
Wouldn’t you be out there trying to claim credit for it instead of being mad about it? Well, theory mad about it. They’re mad whenever there is good economic news, whenever what they ostensibly want happens, they’re unhappy and upset. What can we conclude from this? They want things to get worse! We went through a 15-year period where there was no warming. They came up with all kinds of excuses.
The reason was there was a downward trend in sunspot activity. But no matter. The fact that it had not warmed in fifteen years, you would think they’d be happy! This has been what they suggesting, that they’ve been promoting, what they’ve been saying we need to stop the warming. Were they happy? (Snort!) No. They tried to say people saying the warming would stop were lying. So they want it to worsen. But why would they want it to worsen?
Why would these people on the left want more CO2, why would they want more pollution, why would they want more climate change and global warming? Because it’s all been politicized. The worse it gets, the more they can point fingers of blame at their political opponents as being responsible. So now Donald Trump is responsible for Hurricane Florence because he has been “complicit in it,” which means he’s colluding. But I still want everybody to realize what is happening here.
We are on the cusp here of what could be a devastating, damaging storm. I’m talking about human life, human injury, property value. We could have… You know, I don’t know how bad it’s gonna be, but I’ll go with the flow. I’ll go with their alarmist forecasts, and if it’s as bad as they say it’s gonna be, it is going to devastating. It’s not gonna be unprecedented. The hurricane down in Houston did the same thing. It stopped moving, it flooded everything. We’ve had damaging hurricanes for as long as we’ve been around.
But this could well be one of them. You don’t see any concern whatsoever. It’s all a focused effort to try to find a way to blame Donald Trump for it. Let me get into some sound bites on this Puerto Rico stuff just to illustrate. This was on Good Morning America today. We’re at sound bite No. 7. Robin Roberts, the Co-Host, is interviewing the FEMA administrator, Brock Long, at the Federal Emergency Management Administration.
They’re talking about Trump’s commence on the federal response to Hurricane Maria in Puerto Rico where Trump said it was magnificent our response. Robin Roberts said, “The statements that Trump made yesterday and is also tweeting today after efforts in Hurricane Maria in Puerto Rico calling it ‘an incredible unsung success.’ Do you agree with that?”
LONG: The effort into Puerto Rico was a huge effort by the federal government. The problem is that FEMA was the only responder going in and we were — we were the first responder, and that’s not the way that disaster response and recovery works. What you’re seeing set up now for Florence is that you have strong state government capabilities. Going into Puerto Rico, we were the first responder and only responder, as I said, and that’s not ideal. We faced a crumbling infrastructure, it was rotted and decayed, and FEMA can’t help that. We have to deal with the deck of cards that we’ve been dealt.
RUSH: So he’s essentially saying, “We did what we could. We did the best with what we had to work with, but the local governorship down there, the local politics…” It’s kind of like what the Democrats have done to New Orleans. I mean, they had squandered all that money to build the levees. They didn’t reinforce the levees and the levees broke. It wasn’t the hurricane that did in New Orleans in Katrina. It was the flooding afterwards. You could say it was the hurricane, but it was not the winds and the rain at the time.
It was the flooding later. All kinds of federal money had been sent down there to shore up the levees, and it was not spent on that. It ended in various back pockets. Same thing in Puerto Rico. Trump said what we did was spectacular. The FEMA director agrees, but it wasn’t enough because we had no local help. Late yesterday afternoon in the Oval Orifice, after Trump met with Kirstjen Nielsen… Many people get her name wrong, by the way; they say Kristen.
But it’s not. You know, she’s a Viking. She’s Nordic. She’s Danish in there. It’s Kirstjen. There’s a J in there too. A highly trained professional is necessary to pronounce this name correctly, Kirstjen Nielsen and wrong long from FEMA were in there. A reporter said, “What lesson do we take from what happened in Puerto Rico? How do you apply lessons we took from Puerto Rico to Hurricane Florence?”
THE PRESIDENT: I think Puerto Rico was incredibly successful. Puerto Rico was actually our toughest one of all because it’s an island so you can’t truck things onto it. Everything’s by boat. Puerto Rico got hit not with one hurricane, but with two. And the problem with Puerto Rico is their electric grid and their electric generating plant was dead before the storms ever hit. It was in very bad shape. The job that FEMA and law enforcement and everybody did working along with the governor in Puerto Rico, I think, was tremendous. I think the Puerto Rico was an incredible unsung success.
RUSH: It was! Think of the logistics alone, just getting there and getting massive amounts of supplies and equipment to start rebuilding down there. Then we find out they hoarded hundreds of thousands of bottles of water from their own citizens. It used to be that people were proud when America did good work and disaster relief, proud when America was helpful, did great things, used our prosperity in the assistance and service to others in need. No longer!
Nah. All we’re gonna focus on here is how incompetent the boob president is how he doesn’t care about people and how our reaction and response was horrible and dilapidated and terrible. Just rip everything to shreds. It’s an outpost of pure, unadulterated pessimism and negativism every damn day in the Drive-By Media. But not just them. Last night, CNN found even more negativism. They went out and dragged some former mayor, I guess maybe the incompetent mayor of San Juan, Puerto Rico, Carmen Yulin Cruz Soto from the Popular Democrat Party.
Anderson Cooper: “I’m wondering what you have to say to the president tonight in light of his comments, calling the U.S. response one of the best jobs that’s ever been done.”
CRUZ: His words are despicable. They really do not have any connection with reality, and it just shows that for him, everything is about him and political posturing. The man has no idea. He has no solidarity, no sympathy, and no empathy for anything that does not make him look good. Well, I’m sorry, sorry, sir, shame on you. You did not do a good job in Puerto Rico. This was a despicable act of neglect on the part of this administration.
RUSH: You talk about ingrates? You talk about ungrateful, narcissistic slobs? Here these people live in a place devastated by a hurricane. There’s only one people, one group of people that came to show up and help ’em out — the United States of America — and this is the thanks. Only one nation on earth did anything to help these people. We did everything humanly possible, given what there was to work with there, and this is the reaction. CNN couldn’t be happier to give this ingrate as much airtime as she needed to denigrate the president of the United States — and America!
It’s not just Trump being denigrated; it’s all of us. We don’t care. Our reaction was despicable. It was neglectful. I know a lot of Americans who think we do too much in this regard for this very reason: It’s unappreciated. There’s never even a thank-you. All we get is (crying), “You didn’t do enough! You didn’t do it right! We’re still suffering. We’re still in pain.” Right. Well, what political party represents most of the people there? It’s the Democrat Party, right? The party of dependence, the party of sitting around and wait for it.
One more. Max Boot. This is another guy. I do not know what has happened to Max Boot, other than to say that Max Boot is much more of an establishmentarian elite than I ever knew. Max Boot, when I first heard of him, was a columnist at the Wall Street Journal. Now he’s been a columnist for Reuters and… Where is he a columnist now? He’s a Council on Foreign Relations senior fellow. This guy has lost his mind months ago over Trump. It has been fascinating.
You know, Max Boot used to send me emails, little heads up on columns he had coming up. In his mind, he’s a foreign policy specialist. But he has in the past been a figure on the right with considerable respect, and he had earned it and so forth. But when Trump was elected and the campaign, this guy has lost it and he’s irretrievably gone. It’s stunning to watch this. He was also on CNN last night. They were obsessed all night with talking about Trump’s comments on how great our response was in Puerto Rico.
When it was Max Boot’s turn to weigh in, this is what he said…
BOOT: Eighteen-hundred people died in Hurricane Katrina. Well, nearly 3,000 people died in Hurricane Maria, and President Trump even today is still saying that it was a heck of a job. He’s still saying it was an incredible, unsung success story. So how out of touch is President Trump! Far more so than President Bush.
RUSH: Trump is more out of touch than Bush was during Katrina, and Hurricane Florence hasn’t even hit! An obsession has gotten hold of these people. There’s almost like a demonic possession that has come over these people. It’s becoming increasingly difficult, nigh on impossible to even describe, much less comprehend.