Then tell us all what you would have done instead and how it would have been so much better than his response?
While, I have serious doubts as to how much of the relief being promised, is even Constitutional, I will answer you further from the President's perspective, not mine. Thus I will assume--only for the sake of argument--that it would be permissible for Congress to appropriate some money for civilian relief efforts. So assuming, however, I would certainly not have offered to use the disaster as an excuse of a new Welfare program--i.e. upgrading neighborhoods, job training programs, and other devices to make large segments of the public still more dependent upon a distant bureaucracy.
And the proposal to give the Armed Forces a greater role in maintaining civilian order, shows a complete lack of understanding of some very basic American concepts, as to the role of the Militia, etc., which we need to begin discussing again.
Every crisis, is a cross-road of sorts. We can seek to deal with the crisis in ways that reinforce traditional values, or we can seek to deal in ways that undermine traditional values. Sometimes, you can only hold your own, if the crisis calls for immediate response. But the President has not merely held his own. He has adopted an extreme move to the Left--to take us further down the disasterous road that JFK and LBJ promoted in the 1960s.
William Flax