Houston-area allies of that grand Texas city’s Democrat mayor, Sylvester Turner (pictured above), now claim evacuating ahead of Hurricane Harvey would’ve been “nonsensical” notwithstanding the fact that everyone KNEW super-flat Houston was in danger from heavy rains.
Residents were told to bunker down and avoid protective action:
Ignore unfounded, unsourced weather predictions that have needlessly frightened Houstonians. Get info from trusted outlets. @HoustonOEM
— Sylvester Turner (@SylvesterTurner) August 24, 2017
Please think twice before trying to leave Houston en masse. No evacuation orders have been issued for the city. #Harvey
— Sylvester Turner (@SylvesterTurner) August 25, 2017
But now that dozens of inches of rain have already fallen on the city of 4+ million, and more rain is expected today, evacuations are FINALLY beginning.
Which is harder, Save Jerseyans? Evacuating residents BEFORE roads are impassible, power lines are down and the giant, sprawling metropolis resembles a scene from a disaster movie?
Or after?
You don’t have to be a weather emergency response expert to know the answer.
Turner is clearly channeling Ray Nagin on this one (the disgraced former Democray mayor of New Orleans who refused federal help and, as a result, turned Hurricane Katrina into a larger disaster than it needed to be). It’s only a matter of time, I suspect, before he blames George Bush Donald Trump.
History is repeating itself; Greg Abbott, the popular GOP Governor, urged evacuations before landfall but was met with vocal resistance from Houston officials. Turner made the wrong decision and now things are going to be a lot harder for his city’s affected residents:
#Houston Hang on. The CAJUN NAVY is already activated and on the way. pic.twitter.com/O6NYOsmXL4
— Priscilla Schroeder (@MaeMee) August 27, 2017
U.S. Army Corps of Engineers releases water from 2 Houston flood-control dams; thousands of homes to be impacted. https://t.co/10uSMOI1El pic.twitter.com/qL3lpiCphN
— ABC News (@ABC) August 28, 2017
Houston has never faced anything like the record flood from Hurricane Harvey… and it could get worse https://t.co/AXjfYwKOZe pic.twitter.com/Z809MVBeEm
— Bloomberg (@business) August 28, 2017
Of course, it’s also easy in the midst of a humanitarian challenge to blame individuals and ignore the larger pattern:
As diligent, taxpaying voters flee to the suburbs, leaving America’s cities to ignorant Hipsters and government dependents, the quality of governance has continued to suffer.
Politically correct? No, but it’s true. All of America’s worst-run cities are Democrat controlled cities. Without exception! Incidents like Katrina or Harvey provide dramatic examples of the problem, but more subtle examples of urban Democrat incompetence are plentiful in all 50 states and certainly right here in New Jersey, too, as the tenure of Cory Booker (D-Twitter) in Newark makes painfully obvious.
“America’s cities are mostly a mess. America’s cities are mostly run by Democrats. With a few exceptions (San Diego and Indianapolis, and, until recently, New York), Republicans haven’t had much of a chance, politically, in the large cities,” Kevin Williamson opined last July for National Review. “What we’ve had since the middle 1960s was a grand experiment: What would progressives do if given political hegemony, with essentially no meaningful opposition, in America’s cities?”
The answer? Apparently? Let people drown. Assuming, of course, shitty schools or gang violence don’t do the job first.
Federal governance gets most of the attention from the media. That’s unfortunate. As those of us who pay attention know, the quality of state and local governance is what matters most when flood waters and tax rates are rising.
It’s time for Republicans to start talking about it, honestly and loudly, before more people needlessly succumb to Democrat urban governance which, almost without fail, proves to be dangerous for everyone’s health.
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