Democracy Has Prevailed.

February 24, 2018

Senator Toomey RESPONDS To Another Letter (But Don't Think For A Minute He ANSWERED It)

Yesterday, I received a letter in the post (as it was called in the moving pictures) from one of my Senators, Senator Pat Toomey.

He begins:
Thank you for contacting me in regards to the recent false missile alert in Hawaii. I appreciate hearing from you.
A slight shift in the opening. I am used to seeing "Thank you for contacting me about" rather than "in regards to" but whatever.

Let's go see to what letter he's referring. It's dated February 12, 2018. So we can safely assume it's not anything after that date.

As far as I can tell, I've only once asked Senator Toomey about anything Hawaiian - here.

Here's how I set up my question:
A few days ago, Hawaii was rocked with a false ballistic missile alarm. For nearly 40 minutes the residents of Hawaii thought they were going to die a nuclear death. Hawaii, by the way, has a population of about 1.4 million. If only 10% were panicked, that's still 140,000 panicked US citizens.
Which is good because here's how Toomey set up his response:
On January 13, 2018, an employee of the Hawaii Emergency Management Agency initiated a false alarm about an incoming ballistic missile on the state's own emergency management alert system. It took almost 40 minutes for officials to correct the error. This incident is a clear reminder that the United States must continually improve its readiness against threats to our homeland.
So glad we settled that.

Here's my question:
And according to CNN, Donald Trump was on one of his many golf courses, playing golf and having lunch. There was no public comment from him for about 18 hours. In the meantime, however, he tweeted yet another complaint about "fake news."

So here's my question to you, sir: How this is acceptable behavior? That the President of the United States of America could so casually go about his day while so many of his constituents were panicked that they only had a few more minutes to live and yet say nothing about it for nearly a day?
To which Senator Toomey responded with:
On December 21, 2017, I voted in favor of legislation (H.R. 1370) that funded the government through January 19, 2018 in order to avoid a disruptive government shutdown. This continuing resolution also provided an additional $4.7 billion for improving our missile defense system. Among the funds appropriated was $1.24 billion for the Department of Defense "to detect, defeat, and defend against the use of ballistic missiles.

Our country must remain vigilant in the face of growing threats to our national security, especially from rouge states that are developing advanced ballistic missile technology such as Iran and North Korea. Thank you again for your correspondence. Please do not hesitate to contact me in the future if I can be of assistance.
Nothing, absolutely nothing about Donald Trump and his horrid non response the false alarm - which was the actual point of my question.

Verdict: a response but not an answer. Another swing and a miss, Pat.

BTW, I didn't typo in my Toomey transcript. He really does call Iran and North Korea "rouge" states.

Here's a detail to prove it:


Here's the entire letter:
I wonder how many more of Toomey's constituents have written him about the Hawaii false alarm only to learn that North Korea is a rouge state?

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