Trump ‘Taking Action’ to ‘Lessen Our Readiness’ for Floods– www.newsbusters.org

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Excerpt:

On Monday night’s episode of MSNBC’s The Rachel Maddow Show, viewers were treated to a familiar ritual in left-wing media: the exploitation of tragedy to advance a partisan agenda. This time, the devastating floods in Texas served not as a moment of national unity, but as a launchpad for attacking political opponents with science as the supposed casualty.

Maddow’s conversation with meteorologist Eric Holthaus was less an interview and more a political indictment dressed up as weather commentary. Holthaus, a frequent contributor to progressive publications like The Guardian, wasted no time blaming the Trump administration for climate-related disasters, claiming it had “systematically undercut science.”

Missing from the conversation? Any acknowledgment that disaster preparedness and environmental policy were shared responsibilities across local, state, and federal levels, something that the large state of Texas had often struggled to meet.

Maddow’s leading question was a perfect example of that (click “expand” to read):

MADDOW: The rescue and recovery operations in Texas are still underway. It is heartbreaking. It’s also, I think, increasingly infuriating that we’re in this situation. Is it fair to say that we are taking action as a country to basically lessen our readiness, to lessen our ability to protect people and warn people in the face of this kind of disaster?

HOLTHAUS: Yeah. I mean, unfortunately that’s exactly right. I think that what the Trump administration has been doing is systematically undercutting science. I mean, let’s take a step back. Here we are in the middle of the most severe problem our species has ever faced in climate change. And that problem is accelerating. Emissions are accelerating, and this administration has really decided to just say, “nope, we’re not going to pay attention to that and we’ll hope that everyone can, you know, fend for themselves.” And it’s really, really infuriating as someone who’s been covering this beat for 20 years now. I have little kids, you know, like I wake up at night and am just worried for, you know, when’s– where’s the next flood going to be? We haven’t entered hurricane season yet and it’s just it’s going to be bad and it’s heartbreaking.