Hurricane Ian was an especially challenging natural phenomenon for hydrological, meteorological, and geographical reasons.
Ian was a Category 4 — almost Category 5 — hurricane. That meant wherever it came ashore, it was going to wreck things. It carried storm surge of more than 12 feet when it made landfall, enough to inundate practically all of Lee County, Florida, where the eyewall met the continental United States.
And it wasn’t supposed to target Lee County, which centers around the mid-sized coastal cities of Cape Coral and Fort Myers. It was supposed to dive into the west coast of Florida to the north — originally in and around the Tampa Bay area, and then to the south toward Sarasota. But Ian duck-hooked into Lee County and absolutely trashed the place, doing billions of dollars of property damage in the beachfront county of 760,000 people and killing at least 54 people there.
Lots of them didn’t evacuate because people don’t like to evacuate their homes when a hurricane comes. Evacuating means you’re a refugee, and it means, all too often, that you end up in a strange place with barely any possessions. Riding out the storm is usually preferable, no matter what the local officials say.
And even in the case of Hurricane Ian, with its 155 mph winds, riding out the storm is generally not fatal.
But sometimes it is. For over 100 people, it was.
And to the media ghouls who have descended on Florida in the aftermath of Ian, TV cameras and stupid questions in tow, those 101 fatalities are golden.
Why? Because with 101 corpses to feast upon, the local officials in Lee County who didn’t sufficiently browbeat the beachfront residents in barrier island communities like Sanibel, Captiva, and Fort Myers Beach are now dessert for what Rush Limbaugh used to call the “drive-by” media.
And by extension, those local officials have become proxies for Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis.
"Was that a mistake?"@DanaBashCNN asks Florida's @SenRickScott about the timing of Lee County officials' mandatory evacuation order ahead of Hurricane Ian. @CNNSotu #CNNSOTU pic.twitter.com/o2fEEwIu1C
— CNN (@CNN) October 2, 2022
DeSantis is, as Kurt Schlichter described him, the best governor in America. The energy and professionalism he’s shown in both preparedness and recovery efforts, surging supplies and aid to those people who need it, has established a playbook for how to handle a disaster. States that have dealt with natural calamities have looked upon his administration with envy, and he’s burnished his resume not just for reelection this fall but for higher office in the future.
The ghouls wanted so badly to find some flaw in his efforts. They couldn’t wait for Ian to hit Florida and ruin it. Don Lemon beclowned himself — even more than usual — by demanding that an NOAA meteorologist agree that Ian was the product of “climate change,” only to be shut down. As DeSantis has been unenthusiastic (or worse) in paying obeisance to the climate alarmist narrative, he had to be blamed for the hurricane’s intensity.
It didn’t wash.
And now, he’s to blame for Lee County not forcibly evacuating the inhabitants of its beaches.
Here’s how well that went, in case you missed the clip of a CNN reporter attempting to insinuate blame for the loss of life…
https://twitter.com/KevinTober94/status/1576727164371730433?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E1576727164371730433%7Ctwgr%5Ec9142201a55e4a5f37244335d37431a3316905b3%7Ctwcon%5Es1_&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Frvivr.com%2Fvideo%2Fdesantis-wrecks-cnn-reporter-on-hurricane-ian-response%2F
There isn’t anything you can do with that if you’re one of the ghouls. He isn’t going to let you feast on the bodies. He’s going to shame you and drive you off.
And eventually, you get reduced to this kind of bitching…
Damn those things look nice and clean. Not a speck of mud on them. pic.twitter.com/QRI8TJbU1z
— Ron Filipkowski (@RonFilipkowski) October 4, 2022
It ends up being so bad that the legacy corporate media takes up for looters (then again, looting, in all of its forms, is a sacrament of the modern Left, so sure — why not?):
“When the looting starts, the shooting starts.”—segregationist Miami sheriff Walter E. Headley, 1967
Didn’t take DeSantis long to return to form.https://t.co/8FJKyzQY1G https://t.co/uS5jbrx29S
— Mkay (@JoyAnnReid) October 1, 2022
That there is zero truth to any of this, at least where it involves connecting the local second-guessing to the governor, doesn’t seem to matter. After all, DeSantis did everything you could ask him to do.
Clips from 7 press conferences prior to #HurricaneIan landfall from 9/25 to 9/27, when Governor DeSantis warned Floridians to heed local evacuation orders.
Though the storm was projected to hit Tampa & later Sarasota, he emphasized the entire Gulf Coast should be prepared. pic.twitter.com/pcF0vSPBRL
— DeSantis War Room 🐊 (@DeSantisWarRoom) October 3, 2022
And the most egregious thing about the ghouls preparing to dine upon the dead in Lee County is somehow that people aren’t responsible for their own lives. If you’re on the water and your place lies low to the gulf, and a Category 4 hurricane is due to visit, you shouldn’t need an evacuation order. If you decide to ride it out, that isn’t on the local sheriff, the county commission, or the governor — it’s on you. They aren’t your keepers. Perhaps you have good reason to stay, perhaps you don’t, but we have freedom and responsibility in this country and it’s disgusting that the ghouls of the legacy media disparage it so often.
The desire to politicize this has gotten so bad that it has reached the White House. Check out our own Baghdad Bob, John Kirby, who just had to blame Republicans for “climate change,” which supposedly caused Ian to devastate Lee County:
Ohhhh, my aching narrative.
This raises a question: Is Ian being weaponized against DeSantis because there is no other way to stop him from blowing out the hapless beta male Charlie Crist in November’s gubernatorial election?
That’s a likely yes. Otherwise, why would you see this idiotic headline coming immediately in the aftermath of Ian?: “DeSantis asked the feds for hurricane relief. But he’s long used their cash.”
DeSantis has been a critic of Biden on nearly every policy front. But he sure does like the president's wallet.
Over the past two years, DeSantis’ admin received billions in federal relief cash, which the governor has used to fund his top priorities.https://t.co/pmzBGQpz2e
— POLITICO (@politico) October 3, 2022
Crist’s campaign is somewhat typical of a red-state Democrat these days. It’s built by national Democrat operatives who are far more interested in fleecing blue-state donors than winning an election, and therefore Crist’s messaging — chiefly expressed on a Twitter page that might as well be Rashida Tlaib’s or Adam Schiff’s — seems calibrated for the gubernatorial election in Hawaii or Vermont.
Interestingly enough, though, a Siena College poll released Monday showed Crist getting clobbered 49-41 by DeSantis, suggesting his left-wing pandering is generating a gender gap of some size. DeSantis is eviscerating Crist by a 57-33 margin among men, including these guys (beware some rather colorful language):
That gas is here in Arcadia!! #HurricaneIan pic.twitter.com/0sBAmzjgvu
— Chris Nelson 🇺🇸 🏝 (@ReOpenChris) October 3, 2022
…but the poll says Crist leads 48-42 among women.
A 30-point gender gap is hard to believe, and it points to some fairly significant cultural issues in America, which might be worthy of a separate column. Monday at RVIVR, I noted the possibility of an explanation…
I have a theory on this – I’m going to say it’s a reflection of the “shy voter” phenomenon I talked about a few days ago at The Hayride. In that piece, I referenced an appearance Trafalgar Group pollster Robert Cahaly made on Dan Bongino’s Fox News show. Cahaly said pollsters are going to miss on a lot of conservative vote that will be hidden until Election Night because people on the Right simply don’t answer questions from pollsters anymore, and the more aggressively the Biden regime weaponizes law enforcement against people like Donald Trump, the January 6 protesters, Roger Stone and Mark Houck, the more they’re afraid they’ll be put on a list if they express their political views.
And if the “shy voter” phenomenon is a real thing, from a psychographic point of view it would stand to reason that women would be shyer than men. Women tend to be quite a bit more risk-averse than men, and conservative women generally will be married and have families more than men – meaning they’ll feel like they have more to lose if they go on a list.
So some of that gender gap will be Republican women refusing to answer the poll at greater numbers than Democrat women will. And some of it will be Republican women lying to the pollster.
But perhaps some of that gender gap is a reflection of the continuing credibility women — or many of them — still afford to the legacy corporate media.
It isn’t enough, of course. Objectively, DeSantis is giving Florida all it could ask for in a hurricane response and more. And the ghouls are going hungry this week.
