UPDATE: Mayor Sylvester Turner and County Commissioner Rodney Ellis have decided to take no shit from P.  They’ve written a joint letter to HUD Secretary Marcia Fudge requesting she “…halt all GLO actions associated with the current State Action Plan pending HUD’s review for appropriate and equitable distribution of funds to protect our city and region and build resilience as we adapt to an uncertain future.”  Looks like P overstepped here, and hopefully he’ll get sent to the woodshed for being a partisan asshole.  More to come.

ORIGINAL STORY: No, “P” hasn’t announced his run for the WH, but he’s most certainly started in that direction.  Since April, he’s been floating a run against criminally indicted Ken Paxton, who has somehow avoided trial for the last 5 years for securities fraud.  A demonstrated weirdo who has managed to be on the wrong side of every issue, Paxton has become weakened by scandal and become a target for being primaried, and it looks like P has him in his political sights.  P’s also been trying to shore up his conservative creds, even now pandering to the Texas GOP base which is all in on Trump, The Big Lie, and wishing death on everyone who disagrees politically.

P’s latest allocation of federal emergency funds for flood control in Texas counties is the hard evidence that exposes his pandering to the base.  In a $1 billion flooding mitigation grant from the federal government, Houston, which experienced 50% of the states’s damage from Harvey, received exactly…wait for it…zero.  That’s right, Houston which went for Biden in 2020 and continues to vote Democratic, was punished for voting against those who are supported by P’s base.  P has joined the deplorable wing of the GOP, happy to inflict suffering on fellow Texans, just to burnish his image for being an asshole for his base.  They think its funny.  Those who are suffering don’t.  Oh, and his spokesman lied, saying that they followed federal guidelines for distribution, but that’s bullshit, just like everything else coming out of P’s office.

The Bush’s are carpetbaggers, being New England bluebloods, but they’ve not generally been destructive to their adopted state.  W was stupid, manipulated by the corruption of Dick Cheney and others who duped him into invading Iraq.  HW was a milquetoast, but was a traditional diplomat who accomplished getting Saddam out of Kuwait. Jeb, also a milquetoast, got bulldozed by the Orange Menace.  What P is doing is more sinister…he’s playing to everything that’s bad about Americans, especially those who are all-in on Trump bullshit and corruption.  Urinating on the shoes of everyone in Houston is just a start.  It’s going to get worse.

Words fail to describe the disaster unfolding before us so I’ll try a picture from the Texas Department of Transportation.

The dark blue symbols with the slash through it are road closures; the light blue circles are flooding.  To give non-Texans a sense of scale, the east-west distance of this map is over 300 miles.  So far, thousands of homes have been inundated.  Tens of thousands of people are out of their homes.  The ENTIRE Texas National Guard has been activated with over 12,000 personnel mobilized.  The US Coast Guard has brought HALF of its US helicopter fleet to the Houston metro area.  The shelter at the George R. Brown Convention Center is now near capacity with 5,000 people who’ve lost their homes, and shelters all over the area are running full.  Gasoline shortages are just right around the corner since most of the refineries here are shut down; both of the metro areas major airports are still shut down.

The only word that begins to capture this disaster is unprecedented. Unfortunately, one word that can’t be used is unexpected.  This is what happens when you pave over hundreds of square miles of land that was once prairie.  This is what happens when you build homes on top of watershed and up against major rivers and bayous.  This is the expected result of unbridled development without appropriate oversight for infrastructure.  We’re finally reaping the result of what we have sown for years, and if we’re honest, there is major work to be done beyond simply repair these thousands of homes and buildings.

We’ll see if our elected officials will follow through after the television lights turn off.