I am a lover of swamps, as longtime readers will know, so the Trump slogan 'Drain the Swamp' was always a non-starter with me. Swamps, marshes, and other wetlands serve a vital ecological function, being hotbeds of biodiversity, breeding grounds for all sorts of terrestrial and marine life. Draining swamps negatively impacts regions... especially when those swamps are drained for the development of low-lying infrastructure.
On today's Brian Lehrer Show, Harvey took central stage. In my estimation, Harvey is the perfect 'Republican' storm, a stormy brew of anthropogenic climate-change fueled atmospheric moisture and a lack of zoning regulations that allowed real-estate development in low-lying areas, and a paved-over sprawl which prevented the absorption of water, exacerbating the flooding.
Harvey is basically the result of literal Swamp-Draining, which is just as bad as the figurative swamp-draining that this froggy fellow claims to be accomplishing.
UPDATE: As usual, Charles Pierce has a must-read post about Harvey and the upcoming non-natural disasters in its wake.
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Meh. 'The Swamp' - like the boiling frog - is a metaphor. You can use the phrase without ever even thinking about draining actual swamps or building below sea level.
It's worth thinking about how far we've come in just fifty years. From zero pollution controls, Los Angeles nearly lost in a grey mist, people smoking cigarettes everywhere, rivers dying and ecosystems destroyed in the name of economic growth.
No matter what Trump does, we can't go back to that - people don't want to live that way.
And no matter what you think of Trump, it's hard to fault the federal response to Harvey. That in itself is an important point - the president really doesn't have the power to do the things he gets credit for. If the administration has the right people and access to the right resources, they'll do a good job. In the case of Katrina, the Bush administration had neither.
The president's job is to build an executive management staff, and Trump has utterly sucked at that. But it comes down to the appropriate administration staff to execute the federal response. This is exactly unlike a foreign policy emergency, when the president is making the minute by hour decisions that either solve the problem or escalate it.
The president can't really effect the economy, has no power to legislate, and can't really affect the state laws and regulations that actually govern us citizens. Trump's an incompetent idiot, but I'm regularly frustrated by the immense boogeyman power people want to imbue in him...
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