Katie Pavlich

She's a really smart cookie.

And on Twitter:

See you soon on @OutnumberedFNC pic.twitter.com/a9k3ktyHrD

— Katie Pavlich (@KatiePavlich) October 4, 2017

Philip Roth, American Pastoral

Following-up, "Peter Matthiessen, In the Spirit of Crazy Horse."

I'm still on my fiction jag, so here's another suggestion.

At Amazon, Philip Roth, American Pastoral: American Trilogy (1) (Vintage International).

Michele Tafoya and Secret to Success

Timeless advice from NBC Sports sideline reporter Michele Tafoya. This is great. I'm showing this video to my students after their next exam, as part of my normal pep talk.

I love it!

Kate Upton in Fiji (VIDEO)

At Sports Illustrated Swimsuit:

The New Democratic Party

Excellent piece, from Caroline Glick:

Over the past week, two incidents occurred that indicate that the party of Harry Truman and Bill Clinton is becoming increasingly comfortable with blaming the Jews.

First, last Thursday, Obama loyalist and former CIA operative Valerie Plame approvingly shared a fiercely antisemitic article on her Twitter feed.

The article, “America’s Jews are Driving America’s Wars,” was written by Philip Giraldi, a fellow former CIA officer and outspoken Jew-hater.

Giraldi’s piece included all the classic antisemitic tropes: Jews control the media and culture; they control US foreign policy; and they compel non-Jewish dupes to fight wars for Israel, to which the treacherous Jews of America are loyal.

Giraldi recommended barring Jews from serving in government positions and participating in public debates related to the Middle East. And, he added, if an American Jewish Israel-backer refuses to recuse himself, the media should duly label him, “Jewish and an outspoken supporter of the State of Israel.”

Such a label, he contended, “would be kind of like a warning label on a bottle of rat poison.”

Plame, who ultimately issued a contrite, defensive apology for circulating Giraldi’s anti-Jewish screed, initially justified her decision to repost the article and say it was “thoughtful.”

She added, “Many neocon hawks ARE Jewish.”

And she should know.

Plame rose to fame in 2003, when she was at the center of a chain of events that led to the delegitimization of Jewish neo-conservatives in the Bush administration through a campaign of antisemitic innuendo and legal persecution.

In 2003, Plame’s husband, former diplomat Joe Wilson, published an article in The New York Times in which he falsely denied White House claims that Saddam Hussein had sought to purchase uranium yellow cake from Niger for the purpose advancing his nuclear program.

Apparently in retaliation for his false allegations, then-deputy secretary of state Richard Armitage leaked to syndicated columnist Robert Novak that Wilson’s wife Valerie was a CIA officer. Plame was a covert operative at the time, making Armitage’s leak a crime.

The Justice Department appointed special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald to oversee the investigation and prosecute the leak. Fitzgerald knew almost from the outset that Armitage was the source of the leak.

Yet he failed to prosecute him.

Instead, Fitzgerald went on a fishing expedition to root out then-vice president Richard Cheney’s Jewish chief of staff Scooter Libby. After a multiyear investigation, Libby, who did not leak Plame’s identity, was indicted and convicted on a specious count of perjury.

The effect of Libby’s indictment, prosecution and conviction was to place all his fellow Jews in the Bush national security team under constant and deeply antisemitic scrutiny. This defamation of Jewish American security experts in many ways paved the way for Barack Obama’s wholesale use of antisemitic undertones to defend his nuclear deal with Iran.

As Omri Ceren from the Israel Project recalled in a long series of Twitter posts after Plame circulated Giraldi’s article, Obama and his advisers repeatedly argued that “lobbyists” and Israel were seeking to convince lawmakers not to act in the US’s best interest. Instead they tried to manipulate senators into defending Israel and oppose Obama’s nuclear deal with Iran, to the detriment of America. These exhortations, made repeatedly by Obama and his surrogates were then expanded upon and made explicit by their political allies in places like the Ploughshares Foundation, which served as focal points of Obama’s media campaign on behalf of the Iran nuclear deal.

Until she resigned on Sunday, Plame served on the Ploughshares board of directors.

Plame’s wing of the Democratic Party is not explicitly antisemitic. Obama never said, “Jews are undermining US national security.” Instead, he attacked Israel and Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu. He attacked “lobbyists” and foreign interests.

Plame’s mistake last week was that, in tweeting a link to Giraldi’s article, she moved beyond Obama’s dog-whistle approach.

In a way, she can be excused for crossing the line, because the rising force in her party has little problem openly trucking in Jew-hatred.

That force, of course is the Bernie Sanders radical leftist wing of the party.

Around the same time that Plame was tweeting her way into ill-repute, Iran was showing off a medium- range ballistic missile capable of hitting Israel and Europe and Sanders was giving a foreign policy speech in Missouri.

Israel was a key focus for Sanders, who is now in charge of the Democratic Party’s outreach efforts.

Sanders said the US is “complicit” with Israel’s “occupation” of Judea and Samaria and Gaza. He said that he would consider cutting off US military aid to Israel. He argued the US should take a more evenhanded approach to Israel.

No similar statements have ever been made by any major presidential contender or political leader in either party.

And yet, they have raised no outcry among his fellow Democrats.

Sanders’s rise has unleashed forces in the party such as former Nation of Islam spokesman Rep.

Keith Ellison and BDS activist Linda Sarsour. Both have been outspoken in their antisemitism. Both routinely defame and delegitimize American Jews who support Israel. And both are all but unanimously embraced as leaders by their partisan colleagues.

Since Donald Trump’s election, most of the media coverage of US politics has centered on cleavages within the Republican Party. But while it is true that the Republican Party is dysfunctional, the Democratic Party is transforming into something never before seen in mainstream US politics.

In 2016, the party of Bill Clinton ceased to be the party of the working class. Hillary Clinton abandoned her husband’s Rust Belt base, referring to his voters as “deplorables.”

Today, the two predominant branches of the party are the Obama branch – which is comfortable with antisemitic dog whistles – and the Sanders branch, which is comfortable with Corbyn-style Jew-baiting and open discrimination of pro-Israel Jews.

Absent a major restructuring of the party’s makeup, Plame’s forced resignation from Ploughshares may be remembered as the high-water mark in the new Democratic Party’s efforts to root out antisemitism from its ranks.

I Used to Think Gun Control Was the Answer

A great, great piece, from Leah Libresco, at the Washington Post:

This is a must-read. Stop simply shouting Australia! and update your knowledge. https://t.co/dwOINpeMJf

— Milena Rodban (@MilenaRodban) October 3, 2017

Las Vegas Shooter Stephen Paddock Was Gambler, Investor, and Mass Murderer

This was in yesterday's paper, so it's probably a little dated, but interesting nevertheless.

At LAT, "The mystery of Stephen Paddock — gambler, real estate investor, mass killer":

He was 64 years old and, to those who knew him, showed no signs of mental illness, extreme political views or an unhealthy interest in guns. He liked to gamble, and had bounced around over the years, living in Southern California, Texas and Nevada. But he seemed to have plenty of money, and had held steady jobs as a mail carrier, accountant, auditor and apartment manager.

Stephen Paddock’s last stop was here, in Mesquite, Nev., a modest desert oasis 80 miles northeast of Las Vegas, where he lived in a retirement community with his female partner and kept a low profile, conversing little and maintaining no Facebook or Twitter accounts.

In an era when social media invites full-throated expression of even the most minor annoyance, Paddock gave away no hint of whatever it was that drove him to commit mass murder on the Las Vegas Strip, killing 59 people in an assault on a country music festival late Sunday night.

“We are completely dumbfounded,” said a younger brother, Eric Paddock, who broke into tears in front of his suburban Orlando, Fla., home. “We can’t understand what happened.”

“He was always normal,” said Donald Judy, a former next-door neighbor who said he was struggling to reconcile the friendly conversations about real estate and family with carnage carried out from a hotel room on the 32nd floor of the Mandalay Bay Resort and Casino.

Almost every week, Paddock and his girlfriend, Marilou Danley, would go to Peggy Sue’s bar and diner in Mesquite, where they would have a few drinks and she would sing karaoke, other patrons and the bartender said.

“She really could sing – great set of pipes,” Bob Hemley said. “Him? He didn’t affect me. Didn’t stand out.”

Everyone seated at the U-shaped bar Monday evening remembered Danley in particular. Bartender Monique Ortega said that when she learned Paddock was the shooter, she called her boss immediately.

“Now [that] I know that it was him, he seemed kind of creepy,” she said.

Paddock, described by the local sheriff as a “lone wolf” attacker, killed himself inside the luxury suite at the Mandalay as SWAT officers closed in. On Monday, authorities searched his light-orange, single-story stucco house in Mesquite and a second home in northern Nevada and questioned relatives and associates but acknowledged that they had uncovered no explanation yet.

Paddock gambled frequently, and two law enforcement sources said he had made chip purchases in Nevada casinos in the last year that were in excess of $10,000 a day, the amount required to be reported to the government.

But relatives and acquaintances said he was a successful real estate investor who showed no sign of financial problems.

Asked if authorities had a working motive at a news conference Monday afternoon, Clark County Sheriff Joe Lombardo replied, “No, we don’t.”

Investigators have all but dismissed a claim by Islamic State that Paddock was a recent convert to Islam acting at the group’s direction. Law enforcement authorities seized computer hard drives from Paddocks’ Mesquite home and are examining dozens of weapons taken from the hotel suite and the home along with explosive material found in his vehicle and residence.

U.S. Rep. Ruben Kihuen (D-Nev.), who received a briefing from the multiagency anti-terrorism center, said no new clues have emerged so far.

“Law enforcement were looking through his computer. They couldn’t find a motive. As of a couple of hours ago, there was no motive. That’s all we know,” he said late Monday afternoon.

Before Monday, Paddock had been a nonentity to local police. "We didn't have prior run-ins with him, we didn't have any traffic stops, we didn't have any arrests of any kind," Mesquite Police Officer Quinn Averett said. “It’s a newer home, a newer subdivision, a nice clean home, nothing out of the ordinary.”

Agents hope they may learn more from Danley, 62. Police were initially searching for her in Nevada as a person of interest in the shooting, but later learned she was out of the country.

Lombardo said she was currently in Tokyo, and investigators are arranging an interview.

Paddock grew up in Arizona, the son of a notorious bank robber. Benjamin Hoskins Paddock, who went by the aliases “Chromedome” and “Big Daddy,” robbed a bank in Tucson in 1960, when Stephen was 7 years old.

When authorities cornered the elder Paddock in Las Vegas, he attempted to run down an FBI agent with his car, according to press clippings. He escaped from federal prison in Texas, where he was serving a 20-year sentence, on New Year’s Eve 1968. Wanted posters described him as “psychotic,” “armed and very dangerous,” and an avid bridge player and gambler. He was removed from the list in 1977, according to the FBI website.

He was captured the following year in Oregon and died in 1998...

More.

Laura Ingraham: 'It could be something as simple as something inside of him flipped...'

I've been thinking the same thing myself. So far, authorities have absolutely no motive. Not much is known, really, despite the media reporting. The girlfriend's supposed to be landing tonight. I suspect she knows a lot more than folks have let on. So far the tally is 43 guns located, between those at Mandalay Bay and the shooter's home. And a lot of planning --- a whole lot, including the shooter setting up video surveillance cameras outside the hotel room on some kind of food cart, etc. --- went into this massacre. We're still short on answers.

At Fox News:

Ellie Goulding in Red Turtleneck

She's so sweet.

At Taxi Driver, "Ellie Goulding Pokies in Red Turtleneck."

2018 Honda Accord

This is something else, at Instapundit, "2018 Honda Accord First Drive: Feels like home again."

I'm impressed. I'm driving a 2002 Honda Odyssey, which I love, although the van's worn out. I'm looking into a Dodge Challenger V6 at this point, mostly because it's a fast muscle car within my budget. But the wife needs a new car in about a year or so, and perhaps I can convince her to get the new Accord. It's a beauty.

PHOTO: Stephen Paddock Dead of Self-Inflicted Gunshot (GRAPHIC)

This is the allegedly viral photo of the Las Vegas shooter Stephen Paddock, at Alex Jones' Twitter feed, "Photo of reported Vegas shooter, Stephen Paddock."

It looks like the real thing to me, especially after seeing the photos of Paddock's room at Mandalay, at the Daily Star, via Paul Joseph Watson, "Photos emerge of Las Vegas shooter Stephen Paddock’s body….and there is a NOTE: PHOTOS have leaked online of the dead body of Las Vegas shooter Stephen Paddock – and he appears to have left a note."

And see Jacqui Henrich at Boston 25 News:

EXCLUSIVE: photo from inside #MandalayBay shooter’s hotel room shows gun, ammo, hammer, bipod, optics @boston25 pic.twitter.com/4B2iRhquq5

— Jacqui Heinrich (@JacquiHeinrich) October 3, 2017

EXCLUSIVE: second photo from inside #MandalayBay shooter’s hotel room shows another weapon used in worst mass shooting in modern history pic.twitter.com/gD5IHS7Mk2

— Jacqui Heinrich (@JacquiHeinrich) October 3, 2017

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BONUS: Dana Loesch, Hands Off My Gun: Defeating the Plot to Disarm America.

Leftists Want 'No Truce with the Second Amendment'

Leftist hatred is out in massive force.

Here's the slimeball Adam Gopnick, at the far-left hate-site the New Yorker, "In the Wake of the Las Vegas Shooting, There Can Be No Truce with the Second Amendment":

After the Las Vegas shooting, there can be no truce with the Second Amendment. https://t.co/FfQHXIt4vb

— The New Yorker (@NewYorker) October 2, 2017

So far, all signs are that it was just a guy—just one more American killer who got his hands on some collection of weapons designed for the sole purpose of killing people, and who then killed people. We know that if it was a Muslim with a foreign name, we would be in full panic mode and all we would be hearing about is the ever-greater dangers of terrorism. Indeed, the killings in France, on Sunday, which were surely terrorism, have already begun to attract that kind of attention from the right wing here. But when it happens here, what we’re told by the entire power structure of American life—both houses of Congress, the White House, and now the Supreme Court, locked and loaded to sustain the absurd and radical pro-gun ruling in District of Columbia v. Heller—is that there is nothing at all to be done, save to pray.

The facts remain facts. Gun control acts on gun violence the way antibiotics act on infections—imperfectly but with massive efficacy. Yet, even with that knowledge, some of us, in our innocence, proposed a sort of truce about Second Amendment issues in the face of the ongoing national emergency—the Trump Presidency—in which it seemed essential to make common cause, even with those who have the strange American fixation on the right to own military-style firearms. They don’t have a reason for this fixation—no reason can be found. There’s no argument for it—such weapons are useless in sport, except for the sport of using them; they play no role in hunting, or not hunting anything except helpless people; and they protect no one from a tyrannical government, since the tyrannical government, if it would ever come to that, is hardly in need of small-arms fire to assert its will. Absent an argument for it, they merely have a fixation about it, but it remains practically religious in its intensity. Between the consolidated power of the pro-gun right, and the truth that gun control has slipped down the agenda of even anti-violence liberals, this means that the only American response to regular mass gun killings will be a shrug and faked sympathy. It is hard to know how to stay too far ahead of despair.

This is all lies.

In fact there's ample argument for it, most important being that it's your right to keep and bear arms, and no one should decide how much firepower you need than yourself. No one should decide how many rounds you need, what caliber, and for what purpose. The Second Amendment leaves you in control, not the radical leftists, who'll leave guns in the hands of the state. Fuck Adam Gopnick and the goat he rode in on.

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The Left and the Las Vegas Mandalay Massacre: Blood on the Strip

A really powerful editorial, at National Review, "Blood on the Strip":

It may be the case that the killer in Las Vegas acquired his weapons legally. It may be the case that he acquired them on the black market, and it may be the case that he was able to modify legal semiautomatic weapons. But there are no obvious public-policy prescriptions to be had from any of those scenarios.

There were, so far as current reports can show, no obvious red flags in this case. That is unusual. One of the maddening things about violence in the United States is that so much of it is, if not exactly preventable, then at least predictable: The majority of murders in New York City, and most major American cities, are committed by men with prior criminal histories, often for violent crimes and not infrequently for weapons violations. We have straw-buyer laws on the books, but these go routinely unenforced, with federal prosecutors unwilling to invest resources in putting away low-level criminals — or their mothers or girlfriends — on relatively minor weapons charges. In several high-profile mass shootings, the killers were known to law-enforcement and mental-health authorities long before they committed their crimes.

The usual ghouls who deliver gun-control speeches from atop the corpses in these cases put themselves in a funny position: They insist that they do not want widespread firearms seizures or to revoke Americans’ basic constitutional rights, and then they offer what they insist are “commonsensical” gun-control measures that would do nothing to prevent the crimes that command our attention.

The sobering fact is that mass murders have become an ordinary part of our cultural landscape. There are people who, in the depths of some ineffable despair or rage, desire to exit the world in a hail of bullets and a flood of blood. Some of them are clearly mentally ill, some of them have half-formed political notions — and some of them just want to kill a great many people before taking their own lives. If there were some public-policy innovation consistent with the principles of our constitutional order that would prevent this, we’d support it. But there isn’t one. We are not going to convert our country into a police state — and free, open, liberal societies are vulnerable to acts of mass violence, not only in the United States but in Norway, Germany, the Netherlands, and other countries, including those with stricter gun-control laws. Those Kalashnikov rifles that were used in the Charlie Hebdo massacre are not legal in France.

So, do nothing?

No. There are many things that could and should be done. The vast majority of murders in the United States are not spectacular crimes on the Las Vegas model, but ordinary street crimes in places such as Chicago and Cleveland. We can and should do more to prevent those, both through enforcing existing weapons laws — including cracking down on straw buyers and handing down stiffer sentences for violent gun crimes short of homicide — and through improving our national practices when it comes to parole and probation, mental health and addiction, and local policing. Would that prevent a Las Vegas–style massacre? No, but it might have an effect on the 99 percent of murders that happen every day in a less dramatic fashion. And there are broader cultural issues — for instance, the absence of fathers from so many homes — that are mighty contributors to our national crime scene.

As for Las Vegas: As it stands, the facts do not argue for any particular policy reforms, and while we will withhold judgment until more is known, we should all be open to the possibility that not every crime demands a new law, and that not every ill in a large and complex society such as ours can be solved through public policy. Our friends on the left like to mock those who offer prayers for the victims and survivors of these horrific events, as though there were no Power above politics. We offer our prayers for souls of the lost and for the comfort of the living — and for the prudence and efficacy of those charged with the human response to these inhuman acts.

RTWT.

CBS Vice President Hayley Geftman-Gold Cheered Death of 'Republican Gun-Toters' at Las Vegas Mandalay Massacre

At the Conservative Treehouse, "CBS Senior Vice President Hayley Geftman-Gold Fired for Callous Statement on #LasVegas #Route91 Massacre":

@CBS Are you going to allow your senior counsel to say this?
Hayley Geftman-Gold needs to be terminated, today. pic.twitter.com/7BDm5vm0It

— PrestonGun (@PrestonGun) October 2, 2017

Think in terms or politics and society – the fear behind liberalism is the fear that someone might withhold things (opportunities, money, whatever) from me, fear that if you live your life in a way I dislike that it might affect my life, fear that if you get that job, there will be nothing left for me.

Fear that if you make tons of money, it’s means there’s less money out there for me. So people who believe in liberal ideologies seek control as a means of trying to create guarantees and safeguards against those circumstances they fear.

Modern liberals try to control the world and people to enable their comfort and happiness. Which, as we know, is an endless quest. Trying to control others does nothing in the way of making oneself happy. By extension, voting in this mindset so that government can try to control others will also – shocking – not lead to a happier, more comfortable life.

The conservative (and moderate, independent, but for the sake of expediency, the conservative), on the other hand, relies on himself to meet his own needs. And the trade off of being free to live his life as he wishes is also understanding that he has to make peace with how you live yours.

By extension, aware that he wants to be able to hold onto this liberty and freedom forever, the conservative votes accordingly, so that everyone can remain free and in charge of his or her own life.

But here’s the crucial difference, perhaps, particularly where misery on the left stems: The conservative does not worry, so to speak, about you. The conservative knows that you were born with the same access to self-love, self-empowerment, self-determination and self-reliance that we all were, no matter the circumstances into which you were born. (Think about the millions of people this country has allowed to crawl up from poverty into prosperity – the conservative KNOWS this is possible.) And the conservative believes that if you want prosperity, or a good job, or a good education, you can make it happen – but you have to work hard.

The conservative hopes and intends that the free markets bring you all of the affordable and positive opportunities and resources that you need. The conservative also knows that on the other side of that hard work is great reward – material and, more importantly, emotional, spiritual and mental.

The conservative understands that not only is it a waste of time to try to control you, it’s actually impossible. Humans were born to be free. And if we put a roadblock in front of you, you’ll find another way around it. So we see attempts at control as a waste of resources, energy and time at best, and at worst, creating detrimental results that serve to hinder people’s upward mobility or teach dependence. We see much more efficiency, as well as endless opportunity, in leaving you to your own devices. And we want the same in return.

This is where the media and democrats inappropriately disparage MAGA republicans as heartless. The conservative believes that there is one and one path only to sustainable success and independence – and that is self-empowerment. All other avenues – welfare, affirmative action, housing loans you can’t actually afford – ultimately risk doing a disservice to people as they teach dependence on special circumstances, the govt, or arbitrary assistance (that can disappear tomorrow). And the real danger – they will ALWAYS backfire, and leave the recipient in equally or more dire circumstances. Any false improvement will always expire.

The conservative believes in abundance. The liberal believes in scarcity.

The conservative believes man is born free and will be who he is, no matter what arbitrary limitations or rules are put on him. The liberal believes man is perfectible, and by extension, believes a society at large is perfectible, and command and control is justified in the quest to a “perfect” utopian society. (Sounds familiar!)

The conservative tends to be more faithful – and not necessarily in God, but in the ability of the individual to find great strength in himself (or from his God) to get what he needs and to be successful. Therefore the conservative has an outlet for his fear and disappointment – trust and faith in something bigger.

The liberal believes the system must be perfected in order to enable success. Therefore disappointment is channeled as anger and blame at the system. Voids are left to be filled by faith in the govt, which they surely then want to come in and “fix” things.

And therein lies the roots of love and fear respectively.

For the conservative, when life presents great struggles, he knows he has the power to surmount them. Happiness stems from internal strength and perseverance. For the liberal, when life presents great struggles, the system failed, therefore they were at the mercy of a faulty system, and they believe that only when the system is fixed can their life improve. Happiness is built on systemic contingencies, which they will then seek to control or expect someone else to.

One blames himself. The other blames anyone and everyone but himself.

Cormac McCarthy, All the Pretty Horses

I'm about 100 pages into Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian, and it's really good. I rarely use the cliché "impossible to put down," but it's not like I wanna sample multiple books at one time to break up the monotony, which is what I do most of the time when I'm reading: I like to multi-task my books. But I've been straight on Blood Meridian since yesterday, and I'm recommending it heartily. McCarthy's prose style is astonishing. Some sentences are paragraph length, and blood, guts, spit, flies buzzing, snot spurting, guns blazing, buzzards buzzing make up some of the intense scenes of death and decay (like an apocalypse narratives sometimes and frankly bizarre).

In any case, I also picked up a brand new copy of All the Pretty Horses (The Border Trilogy, Book 1). I'm keeping these books on my bookshelf when I've finished them. A lot of the other books I've donated or given to my students when I've finished. I'm gonna hang on to McCarthy's though. He's quite a specialist. I'm glad I started in on his stuff.

Jennifer Delacruz's Sunny Sunday Forecast

From last night, at ABC 10 News San Diego, the lovely Ms. Jennifer.

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No, Trump Didn't Botch the Puerto Rico Crisis

It's all politics. Here's the idiot Matthew Yglesias, at Vox, via Memeorandum, "Puerto Rico is all our worst fears about Trump coming real."

Leftists have been out in massive force attacking the administration's leadership and response, but it's all a bunch of bull.

Here's Tobin Harshaw, at Bloomberg, "A Q&A with former Navy Captain Jerry Hendrix on smart preparations the White House and Pentagon made for the looming storm":

Tobin Harshaw: Jerry, before we get to the immediate issue of Puerto Rico, why don't you give us a brief rundown of your own experience in the Navy with disaster relief.

Jerry Hendrix: Like virtually every sailor of the past century, going back to Theodore Roosevelt’s dispatch of the Great White Fleet to respond to a massive earthquake on the island of Sicily, I had several exposures to humanitarian assistance/disaster relief operations during my career. Perhaps the most instructive was when I served with Tactical Air Control Squadron 11 from 2005 to 2008. During that tour, the squadron provided detachments in response to earthquakes and volcano eruptions, including directing air operations in Kashmir following a 7.1 magnitude earthquake. The devastation made the roads largely impassable to wheeled vehicles and at that altitude the air is so thin that helicopter cannot lift as many supplies with each flight.

Most of the time, our people operated from light amphibious carriers. But we also supplied detachments to the West Coast-based hospital ship USNS Mercy when she got underway in support of the planned Pacific Partnership summer exercise.

TH: So, it seems like everybody has blasted Trump administration's response to the Puerto Rico crisis. Has that criticism been fair?

JH: No, I don’t think so. First of all, there was a fair amount of anticipatory action that is not being recognized. Amphibious ships, including the light amphibious carriers Kearsarge and Wasp and the amphibious landing ship dock Oak Hill were at sea and dispatched to Puerto Rico ahead of the hurricane’s impact.

These are large ships that have large flight decks to land and dispatch heavy-lift CH-53 helicopters to and from disaster sites. They also have big well-decks -- exposed surfaces that are lower than the fore and aft of the ship -- from which large landing craft can be dispatched to shore carrying over 150 tons of water, food and other supplies on each trip. These are actually the ideal platforms for relief operations owing to their range of assets. The ships, due to their designs to support Marine amphibious landings in war zones, also have hospitals onboard to provide medical treatment on a large scale. That these ships were in the area should be viewed as a huge positive for the administration and the Department of Defense.

TH: On the flip side, others say that sending the hospital ship Comfortwas unnecessary -- purely symbolic and possibly counterproductive -- given that the number of hospital beds was not the problem. What's your opinion?

JH: Comfort can add to the solution, but her lack of well-decks and large boats as well as her limited support of helicopter operations means that she has to go alongside a pier to be effective. In the immediate aftermath of a huge storm, pulling into a port that has not been surveyed for underwater obstacles like trees or cables or other refuse is an invitation to either put a hole your ship or foul your propellers or rudders.

That being said, there was a broad misunderstanding of the Comfort’s mission. She is not an “emergency response ship” but rather a hospital ship. She was built to accompany a large military force into a war zone as part of a buildup over time of capabilities to respond to wartime injuries. She is manned by military and civilian mariners as well as active and reserve medical personnel. It takes time to both man and equip her for sea. Given that there was no certainty where the hurricane would hit, it doesn’t make sense to have readied her prior to its impact.

It is revelatory of where the U.S. group mind is now that when the American public thinks about ships like the Comfort and Mercy, they automatically think of them as part of a civilian emergency response force rather than quietly considering the type of potential conflict that would require a hospital ship with 1,000 beds. I can tell you that when I think of those ships, I internally shudder at the thought of the type of conflict they were intended to support.

TH: Your plaudits toward the White House on all this are surprising to say the least. But where does the response still need to improve?

JH: One area in which the Trump administration could possibly lend additional assistance would be looking at a more robust activation of its assets in the Defense Department's Transportation Command to include more heavy-lift and cargo aircraft, as well as Maritime Administration shipping to move the logistics-heavy large infrastructure items on the ocean. Everything from bulldozers to transformers needs to come by ships, and it's been decades since it was really flexed to its full capacity. This would have the dual purpose of revealing any significant weaknesses in the Transportation Command assets and readiness should we need it in a military emergency down the road.

TH: Many critics feel that Florida and Houston had much better preparation before their storms hit this month. What could have been done better in advance in Puerto Rico, and what can be done in the rebuilding process to help minimize damage next time around?

JH: Puerto Rico is an island that suffers from its position in the middle of the Caribbean and its physical separation from the U.S. Its roads were in disrepair and its electrical grid was antiquated prior to the hurricane. The island has also suffered for years from ineffective local government and rising local territorial debt.

The Navy used to operate a large Navy base there, Naval Station Roosevelt Roads. I spent six months on the island in 1993, but when the island’s population protested the presence of the training range at nearby Vieques Island, the Navy shuttered the base, taking $300 million a year out of the Puerto Rican economy. I have no doubt that the federal government will be taking a hard look at large infrastructure investments and I hope that local governments look at building and general construction codes to make future buildings more hurricane survivable.

TH: What has been the most impressive crisis response/disaster relief operation undertaken by the Pentagon in recent decades? The tidal wave and nuclear disaster at Fukushima, Japan? The Indian Ocean typhoon?

JH: Without a doubt the Joint Force response to the 2004-05 earthquake and tsunami was the most massive and well-executed relief operation of my professional career. Virtually the entire U.S. Seventh Fleet under the leadership of Vice Admiral Doug Crowder responded with multiple carrier and amphibious strike groups. Water, food, medicine and other supplies flowed to and from disaster sites all over a vast geographical region. Crews worked for weeks on end to bring aid to people miles from the shoreline. The amount of coordination required was on the scale of a small war, and yet the supplies flowed both efficiently and effectively to where they were needed most.

TH:  What other sorts of "soft power" can the Navy and other branches put an emphasis on going beyond reacting to disasters? Things like building roads and health facilities in the developing world?

JH: Exercises like the Pacific Partnership are superb for building good will. Navy SeaBees help to build school buildings and other administrative facilities with local tribal leaders. Wells are dug to provide fresh water and medical teams provide basic measles-mumps-rubella and polio vaccines, greatly decreasing child mortality rates in remote regions. These type of operations provide long term benefits for the U.S. in regions where radical terrorism can easily take hold...

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