Could you even imagine receiving that?
I grew up during the Cold War and I never had anything happen that was anywhere near as frightening as this.
And it even appeared on local Hawaiian television.
Terrifying!
I went to college in Hawaii and I have say that back then at least there were just not that many places to go to for shelter.
The same must be essentially true today because residents were literally
stuffing their children down storm drains in a frantic attempt to keep them safe.
It was almost forty minutes later that residents received this correction.
Can you imagine being that terrified for more than half an hour, only to find out that it was all a mistake?
Speaking of mistakes Donald Trump
just kept right on golfing while all of this was going on:
Critics are blasting President Donald Trump for continuing to golf Saturday while frantic Hawaii residents rushed for cover after a false cell phone alarm about an incoming ballistic missile.
The president was on the course at his Trump International Golf Club in West Palm Beach, Florida, after the alert was issued at 1:09 p.m. EST, according to press pool reports. His motorcade didn’t leave the club for Mar-a-Lago until 1:38 p.m.
As of Saturday evening, Trump had not issued any personal statement — or tweet — about the scare. He did tweet about “fake news” and again called journalist Michael Wolff’s book, Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House, a “fake book.” He described Wolff as “mentally deranged.”
I guess he must consider Hawaii to be one of those "shitholes" that are beneath his notice.
Ultimately what we learned yesterday is that this White House is completely incapable of responding to an actual nuclear attack.
Courtesy of
Politico:
A false warning of a missile threat in Hawaii sent White House aides scrambling Saturday, frantically phoning agencies to determine a response and triggering worries about their preparedness almost a year into the Trump administration.
President Donald Trump's Cabinet has yet to test formal plans for how to respond to a domestic missile attack, according to a senior administration official. John Kelly, while serving as Secretary of Homeland Security through last July, planned to conduct the exercise. But he left his post to become White House chief of staff before it was conducted, and acting secretary Elaine Duke never carried it out.
The administration ran the exercise on Dec. 19 at the deputies' level, at the behest of Kelly and newly sworn in Homeland Security chief Kirstjen Nielsen. But as of Saturday, when Hawaii residents were taking cover, the federal government had yet to play out the same scenario with Cabinet secretaries at what is known as the principals level.
"The U.S. government hasn't tested these plans in 30 years,” said the senior administration official involved in the White House response. “All the fresh faces sitting around the table in the situation room have little idea what their roles would be in this scenario. The bottom line is that without a principals level exercise we shouldn’t have any confidence that the Cabinet would know what to do in an attack scenario."
Can't say I am surprised by this.
I saw the poor man in charge of these alerts in Hawaii taking responsibility for his mistake, and I think there is a strong possibility he will lose his job over it.
However let's take a moment to remember that the ONLY reason that Hawaii was doing these kinds of drills in the first place is the now very real concern that North Korea might send a missile toward America, and that this fear took hold because of some childish exchanges between Kim Jong Un and the imbecile in the White House.
It took actress Jamie Lee Curtis to say what most of us are probably already thinking.
Yes, exactly!
If Barack Obama had still been in charge, I seriously doubt that the people of Hawaii would have been quite so panicked in response to that alert.
After all they knew an adult was in charge and probably would have thought it was a mistake. Which it was.
But under Donald Trump, NOBODY feels safe.
And we know that not only is a nuclear war more likely, but that our government is completely unprepared for the first missile launches that would likely start one.
Welcome my friends, to Trump's America.
