Kentucky storms bring out the ghouls of society

Kentuckians hadn't even begun to attempt to comprehend and evaluate the damage from last weekend's deadly storms before the political opportunist ghouls emerged from their dens, seeking to exploit the tragedy and destruction for their own partisan and ideological means.

It's to be expected that the left would do this. It's their modus operandi. "Never let a crisis go to waste," after all. We saw it with the recent Michigan school shooting, and now we're seeing it here in the Bluegrass State where it hits close to home.

The piling-on comes in two pretty definable categories. The common thread is that Kentucky is a red state represented in the United States Senate by Republicans Mitch McConnell and Rand Paul, and thus deserves what happened.

The first claim is that the tornado outbreak was caused by global warming climate change and McConnell and Paul and the rest of their party members are climate deniers. And with Kentucky's status as an important coal-producing state, the storms are karma for contributing so much to harmful carbon emissions.

There's absolutely no proof that global warming climate change had anything to do with the tornado outbreak. There's a perfectly logical meteorological explanation for what happened that has nothing to do with any alleged long-term worldwide increases in temperature. There was a warm, moist airflow coming up from the south consistent with the La Nina weather pattern we're in currently. At the same time, there was a fast-moving cold air mass aloft in the atmosphere that collided with the warm southerly flow.  Warm air rises, and when it encountered that fast-moving cold air aloft, it produced discrete supercell thunderstorms due to the convection and updraft. It didn't help matters that there was a seasonal cold front behind those colliding air masses, pushing eastward. It was a recipe for disaster, and could have been much worse had there been sunshine fueling atmospheric instability.

Even the Associated Press, which has been tilting leftward for years, sent out an "explainer" trying to answer the question as to whether or not global warming climate change contributed to the severe storms. The conclusion was that there is no evidence to confirm that hypothesis. So if even an outfit as liberal as today's AP can't tie the storms to the left's cause of the day, then it's pretty obvious the left is once again trying to politicize a tragedy and try to use it to further their agenda.

The second claim is aimed more directly at Paul, and it's probably not coincidental that he's up for re-election next year. As one might expect, Paul (along with McConnell and the rest of Kentucky's federal congressional delegation) asked President Biden for a federal disaster declaration for the impacted areas. The shrill voices on the left immediately began calling Paul a hypocrite, citing his stances on past disaster relief efforts in states run by Democrats. The example most often cited was aid in the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy several years ago.

Paul and other Republicans have never opposed federal aid for any natural disaster. Most of their disagreement has centered on those aid bills being larded up with unrelated pork to fund liberals' pet projects. They only opposed congressional appropriations if they were full of poison pills. They would gladly have voted for the relief bills if they were clean. (And this Kentuckian hopes that if any legislative relief bills are full of appropriations not connected to the disaster here and in nearby states, Paul and the rest vote against it, too.) In addition, Paul has long advocated for disaster relief funding to be offset by cuts in other government spending, instead of coming solely from printed and invented money. It's not hypocritical for Paul to ask for federal aid for Kentucky if he insists on the same parameters as he wanted for New Jersey and other states.

There was a little local piling-on as well. The Mayfield candle factory that was destroyed had received state incentives during the administration of former Republican Gov. Matt Bevin, and it employed prisoner labor under a work-release program partnership with the Graves County jail and a deputy jailer on duty supervising the prisoners was killed, so naturally some criticism was lobbed at the GOP as if it was somehow responsible for those people being hurt or killed. Some have even tried to link the wages paid by the candle manufacturer to the fatalities, and then they get upset when called out about it.

As more and more national leftists began echoing these sentiments, a funny thing happened. Naturally, Kentucky conservatives decried these statements, but some of the state's loudest liberal voices joined in the condemnation. They're fine with politicization of tragedies elsewhere, but they're appalled when it happens close to home. Imagine that. And some of the same Kentucky lefties who were bashing the candle factory were also complaining about the comments of those from elsewhere. There's the real hypocrisy, not any position or statement attributable to Paul.

In the interests of intellectual honesty, it's not only liberals that attempted to use the deadly storms for their own purposes. A few right-wingers did too. There were instances of critics of Gov. Andy Beshear musing that if someone who had tested positive for the Wuhan Chinese virus was killed in the tornado, they'd be listed as having died from the virus. That's just as unacceptable as what liberals did and deserves to be called out.

Kentucky is hurting, specifically the western third of the state. Towns like Mayfield, Dawson Springs (the hometown of the governor's family), Bowling Green, and others have been devastated. The main tornado tracked well more than 200 miles from northeastern Arkansas, across the bootheel of Missouri and northwestern Tennessee, before entering Kentucky and leaving a swath of destruction nearly to Louisville. Other tornadoes, including the Bowling Green twister, were spawned separately. The storms struck after sunset, but videos of the storm that tore Mayfield to shreds have surfaced showing a huge wedge tornado reminiscent of those seen out on the Great Plains in the spring.

Our state needs prayers, and it also needs material and financial assistance. Private and corporate donations so far have been overwhelming, with some aid stations already reporting they have more supplies than they need. It will be a long process as officials assess damage, families bury their loved ones, and communities rebuild. Grabbing on to this horror story and trying to use it to advance a political agenda is abhorrent and unhelpful. Shame on those who try to use this sad event -- or any tragedy, for that matter -- for their own ideological purposes. The "somebody's gotta do SOMETHING!!!" mentality, rooted in emotion, never results in good public policy.

If you believe in global warming climate change, or think Rand Paul is hypocritical for wanting federal disaster aid for Kentucky, do the world a favor and keep your opinions to yourself until we at least get a chance to lay our dead to rest and begin the slow process of recovering and rebuilding.