OPINION:
Beware the perils of hawking every human catastrophe for personal political gain.
#MeToo. Black Lives Matter. Global warming … er, climate change (whatever!).
Rising seas! Yeah, that’s it! Rising seas it is now!
In yet another desperate effort to capitalize on unspeakable human tragedy, a top official in President Biden’s administration watched the heart-wrenching search for survivors in the Florida building collapse and thought to herself, “I can use this to push our agenda.”
About 150 innocent souls are still missing, most presumed dead beneath the crushed rubble. Before their bodies have even been located and recovered from the site, Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm saw an opportunity.
Not an opportunity to help the victims in the rubble or soothe grief-stricken families. She saw — and seized — the opportunity to feather her own political nest.
The doomed building was on the beach. The seas are right there. Let’s use the tragedy, she thought, to push her crazy agenda to give the government unprecedented new wealth and powers in the name of “global warming!”
Dutifully teed up by a like-minded hack on CNN, Ms. Granholm was asked whether the building collapse was related on global warming.
She licked her chops at the perfect pitch — and the opportunity to feast on innocent human blood and misery.
“Obviously, we don’t know fully. But we do know that the seas are rising. We know that we’re losing inches and inches of beaches — not just in Florida, but all around,” she said, with lizard-like precision.
And just to make sure that her greedy gambit paid off right away, she linked the building collapse directly to the so-called trillion-dollar “infrastructure” spending bill Democrats are pushing through Congress right now.
“We’ll have to wait to see what the analysis is for this building, but the issue about resiliency and making sure we adapt to this changing climate, that’s going to mean levees need to be built, sea walls need to be built, infrastructure needs to be built,” Ms. Granholm said, demon eyes glowing.
Get it? The building collapsed, innocent citizens are dead and 150 more are missing all because recalcitrant Republicans in Congress have not gone along with Democrats latest spending frenzy.
These people are sick beyond words. But it is how they play the game of politics.
Like sharks from the big water, they smell blood. They race to any scene. And amid the death and tragedy and sadness, they pounce and demand payment for every misery.
A motorist in Minneapolis passes a bad $20 bill after shoving a lethal dose of drugs up his anus. He dies in police custody.
It is a tragedy of epic proportions. Public schools that failed the man. A family that was not able to steer him right. Government programs at every level that allowed him to drift along in a sea of indolence and hopelessness.
Where every American saw a tragedy, Democrats saw opportunity. Not to fix schools or help families or solve chronic government failings.
They saw an opportunity to help themselves. To feather their own political nests.
They seized the chance to blame it all on one cop. It was a brilliant — if dastardly — scheme.
Not only did they distract attention away from all the failings that led to George Floyd’s death — each failing entirely caused by Democrats. But they also sparked a nationwide campaign of lunacy accusing all cops around the country of being racist.
“Black Lives Matter!” they have screamed at us for over a year now. But they sure never mattered for all the decades that Democrat policies have been killing black lives all over the country.
Yeah, Black Lives Matter — if it helps Democrats push their crazy political agenda.
Just like the lives of all those innocent citizens beneath the rubble on the beach in Florida.
• Charles Hurt is opinion editor of The Washington Times.
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