To paraphrase Rahm Emanuel, never let a good tragedy go to waste.
Take the storms that ripped through a number of states and killed dozens of people late Friday and early Saturday night. According to CNN, officials believe the death toll could top 80, with Kentucky Gov. Andy Beshear saying over 70 could have been killed in his state alone.
So on Saturday, when President Joe Biden talked about the tragedy, he naturally put some of the blame on “climate change.”
Climate change has become a convenient scapegoat for liberal politicians whenever an aberrant weather event happens, even if the science doesn’t back it up. And yet, Big Tech will make a move against any outlet that dares to call the left out. (At The Western Journal, we don’t kowtow to liberal pressure when it comes to reporting the facts — and you can help us bring Americans the truth and fight Big Tech censorship by subscribing.)
Biden wasn’t able to make his way to the affected area, being at his home in Wilmington, Delaware. However, according to Fox News, he took a virtual tour of the damage and then addressed reporters, where one asked him if he “could conclude that these storms and the intensity have to do with climate change.”
“All I know is that the intensity of the weather across the board has some impacts as a consequence of the warming of the planet and climate change,” Biden said.
“The specific impact on these specific storms, I can’t say at this point.”
“The fact is that we all know everything is more intense when the climate is warming. Everything,” President Biden said when asked if climate change played a factor in the intensity of the tornadoes that hit the central U.S. pic.twitter.com/Wzqfh7BGbR
— CBS News (@CBSNews) December 11, 2021
“I’m going to be asking the EPA and others to take a look at that,” Biden continued.
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“The fact is that we all know everything is more intense when the climate is warming. Everything. And, obviously, it has some impact here, but I can’t give you a quantitative read on that.”
Here was the correct answer Biden should have given as to whether climate change had anything to do with the tornadoes: “I don’t know.” Full stop.
Instead, here was the four-part answer, in which the president managed to contradict himself multiple times in a matter of seconds:
- All the president knows is climate change has made weather across the board more extreme.
- That being said, he can’t tell you about impact.
- He’ll be asking the Environmental Protection Agency to look at it.
- But it definitely had some kind of impact — “obviously.”
The answer turned into a stump speech for Biden’s agenda, in other words. Perhaps 80 people are dead and the president is busy blaming climate change for a discrete weather event — a fallacy climatologists warn against.
But no, this isn’t a matter of politicizing a disaster — not even a little bit.
Instead, Biden nsisted this was about preparedness, and “part of it is acknowledging that the likelihood of fewer weather catastrophes, absent a continued movement on dealing with global warming, is just not gonna happen.”
“We always had wildfires, but who in God’s name thought we’d see … more territory burned to the ground … larger than the state of New Jersey, from the Hudson River down to Cape May?” he said.
“We have to act, but the first and most urgent piece here is we have to save anyone who’s still alive, we have to care for them if we can get them to hospitals, and we have to care for those families.’
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All of that is the most important thing, of course — which is why he continued talking about climate change. This is wholly unpresidential and wholly unsurprising at the same time.
It was neither the time nor the occasion, needless to say, for this kind of rhetoric. We shouldn’t have been talking, less than 24 after the tornadoes touched down, about whether or not the president was using a disaster as a cudgel to score political points.
However, like Mr. Emanuel, it seems our current president just can’t let a good tragedy go to waste.
This article appeared originally on The Western Journal.
