As the legend goes, nineteen years ago this month, a freak bolt of lightning struck the home of Joe Biden in Wilmington, Delaware. The lightning hit a pond nearby, traveled through some wires, and caused a kitchen fire. To make matters worse, Joe Biden wasn’t at home. He was hundreds of miles away in Washington, being interviewed on “Meet the Press.”
Fortunately, or suspiciously (depending on how you look at it), a future doctor named Jill Biden was on the scene. She called 911, and firefighters quickly arrived to find that the blaze hadn’t spread past the kitchen. Within about twenty minutes, everything was fine. “We got it pretty early,” the local fire chief said. The fire department later called the fire “insignificant.” There were no casualties.
In that respect — and in every other respect — there is no comparison between Joe Biden’s kitchen fire from 2004 and what has just unfolded on the island of Maui. Over 100 people are confirmed dead after one of the worst wildfires in this country’s history. Roughly a thousand people are missing, and it’s feared that most of them are children. Countless homes and businesses have been destroyed. Damage is estimated in the billions.
And yet, on Monday, the president of the United States somehow managed to compare all that devastation to his kitchen fire two decades ago. Touring Maui, he didn’t address the bureaucratic ineptitude that led to so many deaths. He didn’t explain why it took him nearly two weeks to interrupt his vacation on a beach in Delaware to visit the people of Maui. Instead, he told residents of Maui the familiar story about that lightning strike at his home — this time, adding even more details that make no sense:
NEW: President Biden once again tries to make the Maui fire that killed ~500 people about himself by telling a story about how he almost lost his corvette in a house fire.
You can always count on Biden to tell a story that didn’t happened.
“I don't want to compare difficulties,… pic.twitter.com/FI4bR85erR
— Collin Rugg (@CollinRugg) August 22, 2023
To recap the timeline: Joe Biden was in Washington. Lightning struck his home in Delaware via his pond and air conditioning vents. Somehow, in the twenty minutes it took to extinguish the fire, Joe Biden raced home from Washington to Delaware — more than an hour away by train — just in time to see firefighters save his wife from near-certain death. Oh, and he wants you to know that he nearly lost his ‘67 Corvette in the blaze. A potential loss that he lists alongside his cat and his wife.
Like Joe Biden’s claims about over-performing in law school, trying to free Nelson Mandela, or seeing gay men casually kissing on a street corner in the 1950s, this story is yet another lie. But Joe Biden’s embellishment of his kitchen fire, in this context, is on another level. It may be the most insulting thing a president of the United States has ever said. As parents scramble to find their missing children, Joe Biden wants everyone in the room to know that he’s a victim too. He almost lost his Corvette!
As you might expect, Joe Biden’s display of narcissism in Maui didn’t stop there. In his quest to make the unprecedented human suffering in Maui about himself, Joe Biden also talked about the death of his son, as he does at every possible opportunity. There’s no point in playing the clip. It’s the same thing he’s said dozens of times before.
WATCH: The Matt Walsh Show
The point here isn’t to highlight what a terrible person Joe Biden is. Anyone who’s been paying attention at any point in his political career understands that well. We were told that “decency was on the ballot” when he ran for president, but it turns out that Joe Biden is perhaps the least decent man to ever hold the office, which is really saying something. What’s interesting is the lack of outrage in response to what Joe Biden is doing. Somehow, neither party is calling for Joe Biden’s impeachment over his handling of the disaster in Maui. No rap stars have derailed any disaster-relief telethons by claiming Joe Biden doesn’t care about Hawaiian people.
For anyone who was alive in 2005, this is all rather startling. Remember when they ripped George W. Bush apart for flying over New Orleans in Air Force One? That was a mortal sin at the time. He took Air Force One over the city to survey the damage rather than landing and causing a commotion on the ground. The idea was that Bush didn’t want to distract from rescue efforts. It also would have been rather impractical and unsafe for the President of the United States to rappel down into a flood zone. But even ten years later, they were still complaining about it. Here’s “Face the Nation” on the ten year anniversary of the disaster:
Flying over the devastation after Hurricane Katrina was a scandal, a defining moment of the Bush presidency. It made Bush look “detached,” the historian says. The flyover they’re complaining about took place on August 31st of 2005, just two days after Katrina made landfall in Louisiana. Forty-eight hours later, he was surveying the damage.
For comparison, this was Joe Biden nearly a week after the fires in Maui began:
"Any comment on the rising death toll in Maui?"
BIDEN: "No. No comment." pic.twitter.com/oORpRuLUpz
— RNC Research (@RNCResearch) August 14, 2023
No comment, Joe Biden says as he gets back to his vacation while children burn in Maui. If only George Bush had tried that tactic. He should have just said “no comment” while on vacation. Then he’d be fine. It makes perfect sense. Of course, if George Bush had said “no comment” it would have been a political scandal that rocked the nation and dominated news coverage for six months. People would still be talking about it. Michael Moore would have done a whole documentary on it. It would be considered one of the most infamous moments in the history of the American presidency. Joe Biden’s “no comment,” on the other hand, did not attract quite that level of outrage — or really any outrage at all, at least not from the press.
The simple explanation for why the media is excusing what Joe Biden is doing is that he’s a Democrat, and Democrats run Hawaii. Bush, on the other hand, is a Republican, so he doesn’t get the benefit of the doubt. In Maui, there’s no conceivable angle in which Republicans are responsible. There really wasn’t any angle in New Orleans either, but they found a way. But they can’t find a way with this story so they’d simply like it to go away as quickly as possible.
The more officials in Hawaii open their mouths, the more believable that theory is. Watch as Maui County Mayor Richard Bissen refuses to say how many children are missing and then threatens to end the press conference when a reporter presses him on it:
Maui officials are covering up the death toll.
Still claiming people are “missing” in order to hide the horrific truth.
Children burned alive. Maybe 1,000 or more.
pic.twitter.com/zAdsop2Raw https://t.co/Y8DSpgpzl7
— Cernovich (@Cernovich) August 21, 2023
Rather than provide any estimate whatsoever, the mayor threatens to end the press conference. He starts fighting with the reporter. What that tells you is that the estimates are dire. The governor of Hawaii, Josh Green, is undoubtedly aware of that. So, like the mayor of Maui County, he’s been dodging questions. When asked recently why the sirens didn’t sound on the island to alert its residents to the fires, the governor started talking about climate change:
While answering a question about the sirens that didn't go off, Hawaii Gov. Josh Green says:
"Let's be real, world. Climate change is here. We are in the midst of it with a hotter planet and fiercer storms." pic.twitter.com/t1lsyukJ0k
— The Post Millennial (@TPostMillennial) August 20, 2023
Josh Green is saying that the problem isn’t really Josh Green or Richard Bissen or Joe Biden or even the electric company. It’s not their fault that Maui is burning. Sure, the sirens didn’t go off. But you made the world a tenth of a degree hotter. If you hadn’t done that, none of this would be happening. That’s the excuse.
Go down the list of officials in the state, and you’ll find more and more incompetence as you do. Take M. Kaleo Manuel, for example. He’s the deputy director of the state’s Commission on Water Resource Management. On August 10th, the West Maui Land Company sent a letter to Kaleo, complaining that his commission had held up a request to free up more water to fight the fires. According to the Land Company, they had tried to expedite water diversion from streams to fight the fires. But in the letter, the Land Company complains that Kaleo’s water commission had held up the request for several hours on various technicalities — saying they needed to consult a local farmer first and obtain permission from the fire department. The delay could have cost people their lives; it’s hard to say at this point.
It’s also hard to know why Kaleo’s commission held up the water request. But you may have seen this clip from well before these wildfires started. It’s making the rounds online. Watch Kaleo talk about the importance of equity, and preserving water:
Meet M. Kaleo Manuel, the official who refused to release water in Maui, contributing to up to 106 deaths.
A Hawaiian Studies major, Kaleo prefers a traditional, holistic "One Water" approach where water is revered, not used.
Water requires "true conversations about equity" pic.twitter.com/4AzVZNwkHk
— Jeremy Kauffman 🦔 (@jeremykauffman) August 16, 2023
Does this mean Kaleo withheld water from firefighting efforts for the sake of equity? It seems possible. We do know that this man never should have been in any position of authority, whatsoever. Take a look at Kaleo’s biography on the Obama Foundation’s website, and you’ll find lines like this. “He believes that ancient wisdom and traditional ecological knowledge of native peoples will help save the Earth.” In other words, he’s an unserious politician. He’s the last person you want to determine where water goes in an emergency. When the fire is headed towards your home, you don’t want “ancient wisdom.” You want basic competence. And you want water, and lots of it.
As it happens, “unserious” also describes the regulators in charge of monitoring Hawaii Electric, which likely caused this fire. On his Substack, investigative journalist Lee Fang reports that Hawaii Electric knew about the threat of wildfires. Specifically, in a regulatory filing last summer, Hawaiian Electric disclosed that the, “risk of a utility system causing a wildfire ignition is significant.” They estimated the work to address that risk would cost more than $6 million.
However, the company ultimately spent only $245,000 on minor upgrades to their infrastructure. That’s hundreds of thousands of dollars less than they spent on lobbying in the past four years. All that lobbying, apparently, paid off. Hawaii’s chief utility regulator recently appeared in a puff-piece documentary this year for Hawaii Electric. And regulators never forced the company to make more expensive safety upgrades.
It falls on Substack journalists like Lee Fang to report on all this, because right now the corporate media doesn’t seem interested in any of it. Instead, like the governor of Hawaii, they’re pinning these fires on “climate change.” Vanity Fair just published a piece entitled, “How Bad Do Things Have to Get for Joe Biden to Declare a Climate Emergency?” Along the same lines, the AP reported that climate change “fueled” the Maui fires.
Already, the effort is underway to absolve these bureaucrats of responsibility. It’s likely that, in the end, only the utility company will suffer consequences, probably in the form of a hefty fine. That’s what happened to the electric company involved in the 2018 Camp Fire in California, which killed 85 people. Government officials made several key errors, including failing to activate an emergency warning system. But none of them paid any real price for it.
What we’re seeing is more complicated than a Left-Right partisan split, where Republicans take heat during disasters, and Democrats get a pass. That’s part of it, of course. But the reason Democrats are able to avoid any accountability during catastrophes also has a lot to do with one of the main functions of a bureaucracy, which is to diffuse responsibility. When everyone is responsible for a disaster, no one is. They can blame you for making the planet hotter instead of admitting their own failures. They can make up stories about kitchen fires instead of doing anything productive. Eighteen years after Hurricane Katrina, this total failure of leadership isn’t enough to destroy a presidency or even damage a political party anymore. This is what regression looks like. And it all but guarantees that, as horrible as the destruction is, we haven’t seen the last disaster like this one.