In connection with the sudden controversy over the number of deaths in Puerto Rico last year following the impact of Hurricane Maria, in which an academic, independent group raised the total number of deaths on Puerto Rico to 2,975, a number which President Trump has rejected, Steve Benen laments:
These defenses are as wrong as they bizarre. Nothing about the federal response in Puerto Rico was “well done,” and to believe George W. Bush “did the right thing” in the wake of Hurricane Katrina is to ignore the assessments of the Bush administration.
But the broader lesson here is that it’s well past time to give up on the idea that congressional Republicans, en masse, will ever give up on defending Trump. If they’ll defend the nonsense we saw yesterday, they’ll defend just about anything.
I don’t think Congressional Republicans are defending President Trump. I think they’re defending themselves. If they and their Party gain a reputation of being the Party of incompetency and amateurs, which in the latter case they’ve embraced, then they and their Party will go down to ruin as Americans discover the consequences of putting amateurs in important positions is death and destruction.
Unfortunately for them, the GOP has such sterling examples as famed “Mr. Snowball” climate denier Senator Inhofe (R-OK), plus an impending Federal Debt blowout which will expunge their reputation for fiscal responsibility – as if their behavior when they last controlled congress, 2001-2007, wasn’t enough.
As Speaker Ryan explained, they don’t need no steenkin’ experts to tell them how to do things. And now that their constituents, those folks who handed them the reins of power, are being served up the results of that action, the Republicans simply have to deny, deny, deny.
Because, when you’re supremely ideologically and religiously driven, you can’t be wrong. You can’t. It’s just not permissible.
