The mayor of San Juan, Carmen Yulín Cruz, is a political climber. She, like Ray Nagin, is incompetent and presides over a corrupt city. Most Democratic cities are run like this and the daily side effects are widespread poverty, public service failures, crime, and misery. That’s to be expected, though. That’s just life under Democrats.
These weaknesses tend to morph into full-blown public service failures under the least amount of stress. In the wake of a Category 5 hurricane, where even well-run cities and municipalities are strained to their limits, a weak system experiences catastrophe. That’s what’s happening in San Juan.
It can take hours, days, and even weeks and months for outside help to come. With total devastation and incompetence by local officials, the outside help gets hindered and delayed. And there is outside help. Lots of it.
America has seen multiple devastating natural and man-made disasters in the last twenty years. We’ve learned some things:
Federal resources will be thin because of the devastation in Texas and Florida. America is experiencing difficulty everywhere and the citizens have shown amazing resilience.
What’s not needed is for local leaders to screech, “genocide!” when that description is a slap in the face of those who’ve actually experienced genocide and when it’s not remotely true. Ms. Cruz should be about calming her citizens, not terrifying them.
All politics are local. It’s certainly true during disasters. The people of San Juan are learning this the hard way.