Smarter and tougher.

Once again, you’re kidding, right?

The gleeful reporting in the media of 3,000 deaths in Puerto Rico lacks a basic bit of supporting evidence: bodies. Before academe and the media suffered the psychotic break that we now observe on a daily basis, when a hurricane blew threw and finally passed, authorities would go in and find those who died. Those deaths would be counted up and that number would be reported as the death toll resulting from the hurricane.

But not now. Now we have to have a “study” spanning a year — this one by George Washington University. Instead of counting the dead in the wake of the storm, academicians pour over death certificates from long after the storm has passed and interview funeral directors and medical examiners and then compile and tabulate their “findings” in order to compare them to historic mortality data. (This myocardial infarction here, would it have happened in this 63 year old guy when it did anyway or was his coronary disease likely aggravated by the post-traumatic stress of the hurricane?) Numerators and denominators are duly put in their places and the calculation is done and thus emerges an “excess mortality” value that can be reported — as a total coincidence, of course — concurrently with the impact of a new hurricane upon an American shoreline during a Republican administration. (Show of hands, how many think this “study” would have been released during a Hillary Clinton presidency?)

The entire story was conceived, written and timed for the express and sole purpose of making Donald Trump look bad. The Left got so much mileage out of hanging the near criminal post-Katrina ineptitude of Mayor Ray Nagin and Governor Kathleen Blanco around the neck of George W. Bush that they thought, “Hey, this works. Let’s cobble a Katrina-esque story together and drop it on Trump.”

Not addressed in the George Washington University “study” are the “excess mortality” figures attributable to decades of gross mismanagement and fiscal irresponsibility by the Puerto Rican government — a failure seen most vividly in the immediate and total failure of the Puerto Rican power grid. You have to go to one of the righty websites to see the image of hundreds of palettes of bottled water that were delivered by FEMA but never distributed by local authorities. That image never sees the light of day on NBC, CBS, ABC, CNN, et.al. Nowhere in the reporting are you ever told that federal response to disasters has for decades been predicated upon a model of “federal support, state oversight, local execution.” (I would bet $1,000 that if you asked a representative sample of 1,000 people, “Who has primary responsibility for disaster relief, state and local authorities or federal authorities?”, a huge majority would incorrectly answer “federal authorities.”)

Nowhere in the “mainstream” media are you told that the Trump administration kept military and FEMA assets in place in Puerto Rico in larger numbers and for a longer period of time than for any major natural disaster in U.S. history.

What you get instead is an academic “study” that attempts to smear Trump for his handling of Hurricane Maria.

George W. Bush did everything right in responding to Katrina save for managing the gross ineptitude of Nagin and Blanco. Bush should have, as a practical rather than legally proper response, ignored the Stafford Act and declared an emergency on his own without waiting for those twin imbeciles Nagin and Blanco to make the legally required request. He didn’t. He fastidiously obeyed the law, which delayed getting help to thousands of desperate people. When the Democrats and the media jackals pounced, Bush then refused to defend himself.

Trump isn’t Bush. Trump knows what his administration did in response to Maria, he knows that it was one of the largest mobilizations of federal disaster relief in U.S. history and he’s therefore not going to just stand mute while a bunch of lefty academics and the media trash him.

Which is why, again, the piece makes the point that Trump is a very smart guy.