Oregon - Another Lesson Not Learned

A number of years ago, when I was a commander in the Navy, the small staff I was on was asked by our Admiral what we might do to save some money – the Navy being in a ‘hunt’ to find some ‘savings.’  I suggested we stop collecting ‘Lessons Learned,’ fire those folks responsible for doing so and end all the associated work.  When I received a stupefied stare from the Admiral and everyone else to this suggestion, I responded ‘well, we never pay attention to them anyway, so let’s get rid of them.’  (I'm not certain the Admiral appreciated my "wit.")

Along the same lines, and a bit more eloquently, George Santayana famously remarked that ‘those who forget the lessons of history are doomed to repeat them.’ 

And we keep having those lessons pushed back at us.  No better example are the ones that appeared on the news from three separate perspectives yesterday.

The first case was a court decision that ended the state of Illinois' complete ban on ‘concealed carry,’ the carrying of a sidearm (pistol) in such a manner that it cannot be seen by anyone else.  While this is a victory for the supporters of the 2^nd Amendment, there will be no change in Illinois for quite some time, as the legislature has 90 days to draft new legislation and, of course, more court actions will be taken in response to the court’s decision.

Meanwhile, the violent crime rate in Chicago remains, and the city may well reach 500 homicides this year.  Connect those two issues.  Criminals do not have concealed carry permits; violent criminals already are “exercising” the right of concealed carry.  The folks who aren’t?  That would be the law abiding citizens.

The second case was the appearance of the Chief of Police of Camden New Jersey on several news shows, discussing the murder rate in Camden, 20 times the nation’s average, the highest murder rate in the nation.  How easy is it for a law-abiding citizen to carry a pistol in New Jersey?  The answer is: it’s nearly impossible.  So, who has weapons in New Jersey, and particularly in Camden?  Bad guys.  And the police.  Who have been averaging, according to the Chief, a 30% absentee rate.

Third case, the shooting in the mall in Oregon.  First, it is a tragedy that two people were killed.  But the instructive point here is that the gunman killed himself before the police arrived.  So, add that into the mix.

It is said that the average police response time in New York City – where the police force has been working on this for more than a decade – is now 4.8 minutes (for serious crimes the 911 operator asks if it is serious).  This is among the lowest response time in the nation.  That is fantastic, and an incredible improvement over where it was just 10 years ago (a bit more than 7 minutes).

Here’s the catch: the average violent crime lasts 3 minutes, start to finish.  So, assuming you start the 911 call the instant the crime starts, the bad guy has 1.8 minutes to jog out of the area before the police arrive.  (Of course, this assumes that you can make call 911 while being attacked).  In short, the police will NOT save you.  Just as they didn’t save anyone at the mall in Oregon.  Just as they rarely save anyone involved in any sort of shooting or knifing or beating or choking.  In fact, the courts and the police will tell you it’s not their job to protect you individually from a crime, that that would be impossible.  Courts have routinely found that police forces cannot be held responsible in any way for a crime committed against a specific individual, that the police cannot be everywhere at once, and they cannot be expected to protect YOU from a criminal.

This is not to blame the police – 99.9% of them do a fantastic job.  But, it will still take them time to get to you, and almost assuredly the violent crime will be finished by the time they arrive.  For you, or someone you love, it will be too late.  Because you weren’t able to protect yourself – and the police will NOT get there on time.  Whatever else you take away from these events, remember that: in 99% of the situations you may find yourself facing, you and you alone are going to be the difference between how you come through the event: alive and well, beaten up, or dead.

So, think about it again: if half the people in that Mall had been carrying a concealed weapon, would the gunman have killed two people?  Maybe one of them would have lived.  Maybe, if the gunman knew that “everyone” in the city had a handgun, that a large number of people carried concealed weapons, maybe he would have thought differently about what he was doing, maybe he would have gone someplace else.

It is said that a well-armed society is a polite society.  Some may argue that.  But an unarmed society is simply a feeding ground for the criminals and slime of the world.  We have tried keeping firearms out of the hands of law-abiding citizens (that is what the laws do - keep firearms out of the hands of law abiding citizens) in the belief that this twisted logic will result in fewer violent crimes – it doesn’t work.  Western Europe – with restrictive firearms laws that are the envy of any number of foolish legislators - has a violent crime rate that is substantially higher than the US, with some major cities in Europe with violent crime rates unmatched in the rest of the developed world.

Other nations have tried it as well.  In sub-Saharan Africa the only people with guns are criminals, terrorist gangs, rebels and the army.  The only people who are unarmed are the peaceful majorities.  The people who do all the suffering: the peaceful majority.  The answer from the power-loving politicians in the UN: make sure the peaceful majority can’t access any weapons.

Here are the two lessons of history for the day:

1)    You are the only one who is truly interested in your safety. 

2)    The police will not arrive in time to save you.

The Next Four Years - And Beyond

To those who read my blog a hearty thank you and an apology.  I have been busy with several issues, to include writing a book, and have not been diligent in finishing a number of items that I started.  Further, one might think that in the run-up to an election as significant as this one seems to be that it would behoove me to write more.  But, frankly, there are many who are more capable of writing about such things and I leave it to them.

I believe Governor Romney will win this election, though I encourage all his supporters to get out and vote – there is no such thing as a sure thing.  I hope the Governor wins the election and I believe he will be a good president – better than average.

That being said, as I said to a very pleasant fellow who came by the other day and encouraged me to vote, this election is not the end, it is the beginning.  We cannot and should not even try to delude ourselves that is it, to steal Churchill’s phrase, ‘the end of the beginning.’  No, this is truly the very beginning.

There is so much that needs to be done.  The list is long and I will only mention the key items:

We must institute steps that lead to a balanced budget.  The current plan – the one endorsed by President Obama (for which he claims to have reduced the deficit by $4 trillion) – looks forward 10 years and leaves the U.S. with a national debt of $24 trillion (down from a projected $28 trillion – hence the ‘reduction.’)  That means 10 more years of deficits greater than $500 billion each year.  We need to reduce that annual deficit to zero and beyond – the government needs to be running small surpluses.

We need to ‘enshrine’ those surpluses.  The Federal Government has shown beyond any shadow of doubt that it is a terrible steward of the people’s wealth and cannot be trusted with the power of raising debt.  The Constitution should be amended to preclude the use of debt in all but Congressionally recognized national emergencies.

Entitlements need to be reduced.  As painful as that will be, the simple numbers don’t lie: over the next 75 years the U.S. government is scheduled to pay out $211 trillion (yes, $211 trillion) in entitlements.  Remember, that number is over and above all routine government spending (Defense, highways, national parks and all of that).  That number is unsustainable.  There are two steps that need to be taken to survive this problem as a nation: we need robust economic growth – greater than 3% per year real growth (over and above inflation), and we need to reduce unemployment to less than 4% while increasing labor participation to greater than 65%.  In short, we need to create a minimum of 2.5 million new jobs every year, for at least the next 40 years – then the number per year has to increase.  To put that in perspective, between 2008 and today, the net job growth in the US is around 1 million jobs – so we are 9 million short for the last 4 years.  There are many incredibly painful interconnected issues: tax codes, healthcare codes, regulation of businesses – that will bear directly in whether we can sustain real economic growth.  Congress will have its work cut out for it.

We need to reduce the cost of energy.  Raw, basic energy is the driver of every element of the economy – and the cheaper it is, the more you can do.  We need cheaper electricity, and we need cheaper transportation.  We need to invest in oil, gas, coal, nuclear power, as well as any and all ‘renewables’ on an even playing field – economic viability is the only metric we should use.

The world, despite all the hopes of man, remains a dangerous place, and despite some recent reporting, is probably going to get more dangerous as certain technologies proliferate.  We need to be safe and we need to protect our interests and those of our allies and true friends.

Four huge issues: rein in government, spur the economy and set it on a path of long-term and sustained growth, move to energy independence, and protect the nation.  It can be done.  It will be a long and often difficult journey, and we are only – hopefully – beginning on Tuesday.  We must recognize that, after we ‘pop the champagne’ this week, the real work is just beginning.

Still, every journey begins with a single step, and Tuesday, we take that first step.

The Real Debate

The spin from some of the wonks was that President Obama may have lost the first debate on style, but he was the man of substance, while Governor Romney was ‘flashier’ or ‘more aggressive’ but his substance doesn’t hold together.  In the second debate President Obama was ‘more aggressive’ and won on points, or some such thing.  As with much that passes for news reporting these days, the stories could have been written days before and only marginally ‘tweaked’ after the debates.

So, here’s a simple thought about the ‘debates,’ politicians, like CEOs, baseball players, cab drivers, doctors, lawyers and everyone else should be judged on their performance.  As an old dead Roman guy said: Deeds not Words.

But performance can be misleading if someone ‘plays with the numbers;’ it can be difficult to compare one number with another because there is no consistency between the statistics.

Despite the oft mis-quoted remark that ‘consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds,’* politicians must be judged on their performance, and held up against certain standards.  Some of those standards are nothing more than some basic facts, such as the economy.

Sports fans are well familiar with this problem, as they try to compare the performance of players of different eras: how does A-Rod compare to Aaron or Mays or Ruth given differences in the ball, in how pitchers were used, the length of the season (to include post season), changes in the ball-parks, etc.  Every sport has similar questions.  But every sport also provides some touchstones that speak to standards that translate through the years, a consistent ‘thread’ that helps ground the comparison: a football field is still 100 yards long, bases are 90 feet apart, the net is 10 feet up, and 3 feet high at the center in tennis, etc.  Because of this consistency we can begin to compare numbers and thus understand performance, we can begin to compare Don Budge to Roger Federer.  Though he last played football more than 40 years ago, we can look at the late Alex Karras (RIP) and review his stats, and watch a game film and appreciate just how great a player he was.

That is what consistency provides us.

Which leads us to the unemployment rate – and the Unemployment Rate.

We all know that the Unemployment Rate is now down below 8% (7.8%).  I believe it will fall further in the next month, probably to 7.6%.  This is because the folks at the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) like their jobs and don’t want to be among the millions with no jobs. One web site asserted that the rate was:

Unemployment Rate = Number of Unemployed / Total Labor Force

But, in fact, most assuredly, that is not how the BLS is computing the ‘Unemployment Rate.’  And that is why I capitalized Unemployment Rate, because it is now a specific thing, not the actual percentage of adults in the US without jobs, but a weird, and heavily manipulated number that is created by the BLS, like reading sports statistics and trying to determine a quarterback’s rating.  It isn’t a real number, it is made up.  The significant difference is that we can find out how the quarterback rating is created, but the Unemployment Rate is some sort of State Secret.

If we really wanted to know how many people had jobs – against the number of people who want jobs (and against the people who need jobs – not the same number), we would need to go ask everyone in the US. 

That is hard, expensive and takes a long time.  So, the number that is generated is based on asking 60,000 US families and 160,000 US business about their employment status.  That would be okay as well, if we all then knew precisely what happened next.  But we don’t.  Because then, the BLS adjusts ‘those’ numbers to reflect other data, to include variations between the 50 states, month of the year and season (annual plantings and harvest affect job numbers in many states), the start and stop of the school year, and a number of other factors.  But, here’s the trick: each one of these variables is adjusted based upon standards that are known to only a select group of people within the BLS.  Certain numbers are routinely excluded.  For example, if you don’t have a job, and you are – within the definition of the BLS – no longer looking for a job (if you have been unemployed for more than 6 months and do not collect any type of compensation, for example, and are living with your brother or sister or mom and dad) you are invisible, you no longer are counted.

After all this churning of data the BLS produces a number.  I suppose it is possible that the folks who work at BLS never thought about making their big boss happy, that the numbers simply ‘fall out’ of the formula and they publish them, month in, month out.  But, given that they have now admitted that they ‘somehow’ failed to include the data from California – the most populous state in the Union – and one that has been particularly hard hit by the recession and state government incompetence, do the numbers still seem credible?

The point is simply this: 45 months after taking office our real unemployment rate remains above 8%.  If you add in all the people who do not have jobs and have been – literally and figuratively - ‘discounted’ by the BLS, the total number of people who don’t have jobs but would like one is on the order 15 million (as opposed to the roughly 12 million represented by the number 7.8%) and an additional 8 to 10 million people who have part time jobs that want full time jobs.  Of course, there are even more people out there who would be willing to work if there were additional jobs (there are roughly 85 million Americans old enough to be in the work force and a significant portion of them would be willing to consider some sort of work if it were available).

The long and short of it is that the President has had nearly 4 years to work on the economy, and there is no better number to indicate progress – or lack of it – then the number of folks who have jobs and the number who want jobs.  The President’s performance – not in the debates but in His Job has been abysmal.

The results of the debates aren’t important, those are just words.  Let’s look at deeds.

* Emerson really said ‘a foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds,’ foolish being an important qualifier, and was speaking to the idea that many people – those with little minds - fail to recognize the differences between one situation and another and thus fail to recognize that when someone says one thing on day one and another thing on day two there can be a reason for that difference.

The Great Debate?

Well, Governor Romney did a great deal better then most people expected, particularly those who live off the pabulum that flows from the mainstream media.  More to the point of many (though it shouldn’t be) is that President Obama performed so poorly.

Should that have been a surprise?  I would suggest not.  Even a cursory review of Obama’s performance in debates in the past reveals that he has rarely been pressed hard by his opponents, and, more to the point, he has never been forced to defend his position.  Instead, he was always in one of two positions: someone who had grand ideas but had never been in an executive position and hence had no record he needed to defend; or two, someone in an executive position who used (or tried to use) his position to force through his position based on his executive power without really convincing anyone.  Thus, Obamacare, forced through against the wishes of the majority of the US population (and which just squeaked through Congress, was mainly drafted out of sight of nearly everyone and presented without detailed explanation.)  These simple facts, coupled with the twin realities of a coddling press and the fact that the Presidency is an office in which the occupant can easily isolate himself and insist on deferential treatment, means that President Obama was in fact facing a situation with which he has no real experience.

Can Obama do better next time?    

Certainly.  But it will require a few things:

Hard preparation: the President will need to bring in someone who is substantially brighter and tougher than John Kerry to play the role of Mitt Romney.  The questions must be tougher, the opponent tougher, the ‘practice audience’ must be tough and unforgiving.  And they need to ‘hit it hard’ over the next two weeks.  Assuming the President ‘has it’ in regard to this or that point is a mistake.

Dealing with his record for the last 4 years: the President has to address the floundering economy head on, telling the American people why unemployment is so high (and disregarding the nonsense perpetrated on the US by Department of Labor with the latest unemployment numbers); he must explain why – despite the fact that he added more than $1 trillion to the debt in the last 12 months – his economic path is the right one; he must explain why his health care plan will, in fact, work; he must explain why he, and he alone, can solve Social Security problems for the next four years.  Despite the nonsense published by his campaign, Mitt Romney isn’t telling lies, he’s simply explaining his program.  Obama has to show why the Obama program – despite the abysmal record of the last 45 months – is better.  Romney won the debate because he succeeded in explaining his program and Obama failed to defend his.

Recognition of his defeat: But the above requires that Obama and his campaign people recognize that Romney beat him fair and square.  The senior staffers who don’t acknowledge that should be fired.  And for his two or three closets advisors, in private, should start looking forward with a conversation that begins something like: “Boss, you got your butt kicked.  We have a lot to do to clean this up.”   It starts there; if Obama can’t get his head around the simple idea that Romney was better than he was, that he lost, then he will lose again.

So, here are a couple of predictions: if Vice President Biden performs poorly, and President Obama performs poorly in the second debate, “international tensions” will “force” the President to cancel the final debate.

Further, the President will search for any opportunity to target someone, no matter how tenuous the intelligence, who is ‘connected’ to the attack on Benghazi, and conduct some sort of attack – cruise missiles or B-2 bombers or SEALs or some other means.   Ideally, such an attack would take place the night of the (cancelled) third debate.

What's It All About?

To listen to some of the ads on TV for the various politicians it would seem that we have two men arguing about the same thing, only who is more committed to doing so:  Cut the deficit, cut unemployment, create jobs, grow the economy, reduce taxes, defend the nation, etc., etc., etc.  Both insist that they are the ones who will do it, while insisting that the other guy won’t.  Recently, President Obama has even come out a statement asserting that the problem ‘can’t be fixed from the inside,’ that it can ‘only be fixed from the outside.’

What does he mean by ‘insider?’  Well, he didn’t really elaborate, but the implication was a ‘politico,’ one of those people who ‘live and breath the Washington DC air,’ who have spent their entire lives in politics and who view everything through the lens of politics.

This seems a little odd for someone – President Obama - who has been an insider since he reached law school, and has been the DC ‘fast mover’ since he was the featured speaker at the Democratic National Convention in 2004.

But let’s look at it from another perspective.  People have been complaining about the deficit for many years (though, granted it hasn’t been this extreme relative to GDP since World War II), people have been complaining about the growth in entitlement programs (again, it is worse now), people have been complaining about the complexity of the tax code and the seemingly glaring inconsistencies.  And so on and so forth.  But no one does anything about it.  Even when President Obama had overwhelming majorities for two years in both the House and Senate, not only did he not do anything about it, he didn’t even pass complete budgets for those years.  (In fact, in January, win or lose, he will become the first President in history to fail to ever pass a complete budget; another historical first, along with the downgrading of US credit ratings.)

Why, despite all the talk, is nothing being done?  Simply because all of this is, at least to those in power, is theater.  This election, perhaps more than any in recent memory, is about power.  The simple truth is that the President, and many of the leaders in the Democratic Party, is more concerned with power than with any of the problems facing the US.  Simply put, if they were asked a simple either - or question, would you trade your position in office for an elimination of the budget deficit, they would answer no.

The root of this whole mess however is that this election isn't about Republicans and Democrats, its not about foreign policy or tax policy or entitlements; this election is about power, and about the ruling clique holding power - an amorphous association of career politicians, main stream media, academia, a major slice of bureaucrats, and certain elements of the private sector that have long been in cahoots with the government (think GM, elements of the Banking and Housing industries, some union leadership, for example).  The split on the polls are laughable, with poll after poll samples so badly skewed that most of them represent no real data at all.  If President Obama wins in November - and I don't believe he will - it will only prove that those in power can manipulate the organs of government to maintain control - a fact we already knew.  Few if any of the senior members of the Federal Bureaucracy really care if there is a debt problem or a default or a ten year recession or a global depression.  What they care about is whether they maintain, and if possible increase their span of power.  

Where does that leave us?  First, we need to vote in November, vote to remove the incumbent from the White House, and to turn over control of the Senate.  Then we need to hold the Republicans accountable.  And vote them out in 4 years if they fail to improve the state of the nation.  But, more importantly, we find ourselves in a position that is really no different then where most countries have found themselves from time to time throughout history.  What is does beg is the question: What do we really do?  It suggests that there needs to be a few amendments to the Constitution to wrest more power from the 3 branches (and maybe also bringing the '4th branch' (the Federal Reserve) under some sort of control that is responsive to the citizenry.  We must limit the power of the government to tax, limit the power to spend, limit the power to pass eternal legislation, and finally limit the power of the executive to create de facto legislation under the title of ‘regulations.’  Actually, all of that is possible.  But WE THE PEOPLE will have to do it, because the guys in power don’t want to let go.

Some Common Sense on Spending...

Submitted into the Congressional Record, Fall 1949, by Congressman Clarence J. Brown, R - Ohio, who claimed that it had been written by "a prominent Georgia Democrat" (thanks to JB):

DEMOCRATIC DIALOG

Father, must I go to work?
    No, my lucky son.
We're living now on Easy Street
    On dough from Washington.

We've left it up to Uncle Sam,
    So don't get exercised.
Nobody has to give a damn-
    We've all been subsidized.

But if Sam treats us all so well
    And feeds us milk and honey,
Please, daddy, tell me what the hell
    He's going to use for money?

Don't worry, bub, there's not a hitch
    In this here noble plan-
He simply soaks the filthy rich
    And helps the common man.

But, father, won't there come a time
    When they run out of cash
And we have left them not a dime
    When things will go to smash?

My faith in you is shrinking, son,
    You  nosy little brat;
You do too damn much thinking, son,
    To be a Democrat.

Libya, Egypt, Yemen, et al

We begin by noting the brutal murders of the Ambassador and three other Americans – staff and support for the Embassy.  These acts, and the storming of the embassies in several other countries, are intolerable and unless the governments of the respective countries condemn them immediately, in the strongest possible terms, and then take every possible step to round up those responsible, the US should take steps to alter the relationship between the US and that country (note: the other guy already has).  It is little solace to their families and friends that the dead were heroic and noble.  It is also of little note in trying to determine what happens next.  But several points need to be made.

First, and it must be said: This was predicted.  Everyone seems to willfully forget that this kind of behavior had been quite accurately forecast, and equally ignored by the President and the Secretary of State.  Both government officials and others, writing publicly in blogs and journals (including this author), noted over the past 2 years that: 1) we did not have a coherent policy in the Arab world; 2) providing moral and military support to rebels without knowing who they were was likely to recoil against us; 3) complicity in the overthrow of an ally would in no way endear us to those who led the overthrow; 4) wishful thinking as to the future of these various countries was a miserable substitute for a meaningful plan that had real ‘teeth’ in it; and finally, the Muslim Brotherhood may be many things, but it most assuredly is not a friend of the US, and would sooner or later get around to attacking US interests.  The administration has failed on these issues.  Saying otherwise is a lie.  When several US embassies have been overrun, when the US flag is torn down and al Qaeda’s flag is flying over a US embassy, when an Ambassador is killed inside a US Consulate – you have lost that round Mr. President.  That is YOUR failure.

Second, it should come as no surprise to any sentient being that September 11^th is a day when the US embassies ought to be not only aware of what is happening around them, but that also a good day to take extra precautions and a good day to have some prepared responses – both from an information management perspective and a security perspective.  The administration failed on this issue.

Third, while there was clearly a sense that things might happen on the 11^th, the intelligence community apparently failed to penetrate the Muslim Brotherhood sufficiently to learn of the plans to coordinate demonstrations.  This is not a failure of case officers; this is a failure of the senior personnel who set the guidance for the various agency offices around the world.  Is the Muslim Brotherhood on the list of organizations of interest to the intelligence community?  Certainly.  But it is now also clear that the level of effort/acceptable level of risk calculus failed.

There is an old saw that goes: ‘Once accident, twice coincident, three times enemy action.’

Simply put, anyone who believes that it is simply coincidence that independent riots in Egypt, Tunisia, Libya, Yemen, Sudan and elsewhere sprang up within 24 hours of each other, all directed at the US Embassies is beyond naïve.  But again, this is not ‘news’ to many in the intelligence community.  There has been clear concern about this type of action for years.  But the question is this: was enough done to ensure that the US had reliable sources inside the Muslim Brotherhood and other like minded organizations who could keep our people informed as planning developed for this kind of operation?  Clearly, the answer is no.  The fact that we are holding this conversation is proof. 

But the question is why?  Are our case officers incapable of finding sources who could penetrate these organizations?  To the contrary, the facts have shown that they can.  It can be difficult, but it can be done.  So where was the failure?  There can only be one answer: failure of leadership: in the intelligence community, in the State Department and particularly in the Oval Office. In the Intelligence Community it is a combination of not enough case officers, not aggressive enough leadership, risk averse leadership, and a desire among the very senior members of the intelligence community to view certain elements through politically correct lenses all contributed to this current problem.  And all of these issues are, in the end, a failure of leadership – the leadership of the IC and a failure of policy at the very highest levels of government. 

In the State Department it is a willful disregard of the simple truth that many people not only disagree with the US, they hate us and want to do evil things to the US. The Administration can seek to point fingers, and can assign blame to a wide range of forces – including I am sure (somehow) the last President, but the fact remains that multiple US embassies were unprepared for assault, 4 good people are dead, several US embassies were at least for a short time overrun, US interests have been damaged, and the US strategic message has been badly mauled by the public image of rioters on top of embassies, US flags being burned, another flag flying on our flag poles, and our Ambassador being dragged through the streets.

But finally, this is the President’s fault.  While the President plays golf, produces campaign ads, and appears on talk shows, he fritters away any sense that the rest of the world needs to take seriously the President of the United States.  Mr. Obama, as much as you believe it is about you, it isn’t.  Someday, hopefully soon, you will no longer be the President.  But there will still be a president.  That office is more important than you, as hard as it is for you to grasp that.  You need to take seriously the office and your responsibilities.  That means you are not supposed to be high-fiving talk show hosts or practicing your one-liners, but trying to lead.  You have shown yourself to the mob as frivolous and vacillating and weak.  That is what they will read out of this – weakness.  And weakness does not lead to peace, it leads to violence and war.  We already have seen the violence start – Thank you, Mr. President, Good Job.

This disaster is yours – no one else did this.  You have had more than 3 years to establish your foreign policy and it is now close to a burning wreck.  And your answer is to go to Vegas, and to have your minions attack your opponent because he pointed out that the US response to this disaster was week.

This is a foreign policy disaster of high order.  It has the possibility of getting worse.  People should be fired, policies need to be changed, and You, Mr. President need to show the world that you are going to start taking seriously all of your duties, not just campaigning and doing the things you like.