On Tuesday, September 11, as Hurricane Florence lumbered through the Atlantic toward the Carolinas, we received a text from a Weekly Standard colleague asking how long it would take for the hurricane to become political. Somebody would blame Trump or the GOP for something—it was just a matter of when. The Scrapbook wagered that it would take at least till Monday before somebody in the media laid the blame for Florence at the White House door. Our colleague guessed it would be Saturday.
In fact we were both wrong—it had already happened. That very day, the Washington Post published an editorial titled “The Storms Keep Coming.” The online headline gets right to the point: “Another hurricane is about to batter our coast. Trump is complicit.”
“Last year Hurricane Harvey battered Houston,” the paper’s editors lamented. “Now, Hurricane Florence threatens to drench already waterlogged swaths of the East Coast, including the nation’s capital.” The Post continued: “If the Category 4 hurricane does, indeed, hit the Carolinas this week” (Florence was a Cat 2 when it landed, but leave that aside), “it will be the strongest storm on record to land so far north.” Then the editors really let loose:
We have our doubts about claims that climate change (or global warming, as it used to be called) poses an imminent threat to civilization, and in any case, it’s never been clear to us that many of the policies environmentalists propose would do much besides ruin the industrialized economies and empower bureaucrats and transnational elites. But what struck us most about the Post’s editorial was just this: that if the editors wanted to give the impression that climate change alarmism is just another convenient stick with which to smack Donald Trump—or indeed any administration they happen to dislike—they did a terrific job.
