Hard to do this real justice on a Friday but, good god, Sharpie pr*sident is still desperate to prove his low-rent doctored map correct. He’s gotten the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) to issue an unattributed statement falsely suggesting that his dangerous and meritless tweet stating Alabama would “most likely be hit” by Hurricane Dorian was accurate. The NOAA statement is carefully worded and notably doesn’t say Dorian would actually hit Alabama but rather that “tropical-storm-force winds … could impact Alabama."
NOAA clearly buckled under the pressure of a blistering six days of controversy following Trump’s first tweet on the matter in which Trump dedicated his national platform, his power as commander in chief, and the considerable resources of the U.S. government to recast his baseless claim as somehow bearing resemblance to the reality the rest of us are living in.
Several actual meteorologists are going to bat for Birmingham’s National Weather Service correction of Trump’s misinformation last weekend.
From the Washington Post:
James Franklin, the former chief of a prediction unit at the National Hurricane Center, expressed support for the Birmingham Weather Service office which NOAA admonished.
“I thought Birmingham’s statement Sunday morning that Alabama would see no impacts from Dorian was spot-on and an appropriate response to the President’s misleading tweet that morning,” he wrote in an email. “[The Hurricane Center’s] wind-speed-probability product serves as guidance to forecasters, and it showed only a very small likelihood of tropical-storm-force winds in the state, and essentially zero chance of hurricane-force winds.”
Here’s another.
How has it come to this, indeed? Real lives were at stake. NWS Birmingham rightly corrected Trump's misinformation. Trump continues to be the biggest national security threat our country faces. In fact, here’s an interesting read on why Trump altering an official weather forecast was indeed both consequential and a crime.
For a long time people have wondered what would happen if we had a real national emergency and Americans had to trust the word of the Liar in Chief. Well, now we know: Trump will lie, putting people in harm’s way, and then spend all the government’s resources recasting that lie as a truth.