“Dalton Rice is a city official with very, and I mean very little, if any, experience in emergency management. Don’t let the phony news media distract you from the core of the problems. There was no warning system and they were warned 12 hours before by the National Weather. ‘Complacency rules’…..The area has a long history of flooding. That’s why it’s the Guadalupe River.”

“Rivers by nature handle run-off from storms, some better than others. Sometime others need human help to do a better job. But it’s still in Mother Nature’s hands. Stop trying to pack the blame on someone, that doesn’t resolve anything. Move on and devise a way for lessen the severity of these catastrophes” – Top comment on the Fox News article “Texas local official caught mocking DHS Secretary as ‘Homeland Barbie’ after deadly floods,” posted Monday afternoon.

Now let’s just play along and assume that the commenter is familiar with the region, lives or has lived in the area, had heard of Dalton Rice prior to this month, and so on. That the post at least in that regard is informed of Rice’s role and seems to speak to an awareness that, during that presser with “Barbie,” he had said “the storm that caused the deadly flash flood dumped more rain than what was forecasted” by the National Weather Service, thus pointing to what at that moment was in his mind a failure by the government led by convicted felon President Trump but a function outside of Kristi Noem’s portfolio as the NWS is under Hustlin’ Howard Lutnick’s Commerce Department.

Extend the commenter that line of credit. And then some more to ignore the “Stop trying to pack the blame on someone” immediately after pretty much blaming Rice for what happened – irrespective of how much blame he may or may not actually deserve when a full investigation is completed – to appreciate the main reason why this post fails so badly on its own terms and 370+ other Fox News readers are fucking stupid enough to upvote it: At that time a day after the floods tore through the region there were no real questions of the speed and quality of the federal response. Noem was there after all and it wasn’t until days later that it was revealed she’s been hampering the response by micromanaging spending and slowing deployment of search and rescue teams.

Meaning that in that moment Rice was simply mocking her. Separately and apart from the disaster itself he privately considered Noem to be a fucking clown and meeting her in person did not change that perception. Probably even solidified it. His opinion of her had no bearing on the flash flood or the response. He just doesn’t like her and the commenter could not countenance that, painting Noem as a noble and benevolent knight unappreciated by a lowly vassal – and one whom all circumstantial evidence would suggest is a conservative Republican himself.

And that makes for complicated feelings in a world where Gavin Newsom, Karen Bass, and the “DEI hire” lesbian now-former Los Angeles Fire Department chief’s failures and incompetence led to the far more destructive but also significantly less deadly firestorms in January. MAGA Land’s worldview fundamentally demands that someone have blood on their hands for acts of God, even when His wrath is visited upon a Republican-led jurisdiction in a deep Red State during a Republican trifecta in Washington and Rice will have to do since he mocked a fearless America First warrior like Noem.

That doesn’t mean it’s easy, as you can tell by the tortured language in the post. Fox News themselves plainly considered it a disheartening low blow as well, writing “The nickname, and similar terms like ‘ICE Barbie,’ have circulated online to satirize Noem since her appointment as DHS Secretary earlier this year. The exchange has raised eyebrows given the gravity of the disaster response and growing criticism of how it was handled,” with the rest of the article taking pains to sound neutral while surveying the finger-pointing between the local, state, and federal officials.