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Whenever a tragedy strikes and Republicans (rightfully) feel that their (in)actions and policies could reasonably be blamed, they are quick to demand that whatever happened should not to be politicized.

We see this after every school shooting that might have been prevented with stricter gun laws, natural disasters that were made worse by climate change, or, more recently, some calamity that could have been avoided if the government officials who could have stopped it had not been DOGEd.

Conversely, Republicans don’t feel the same need for restraint when that disaster is some crime committed by an immigrant and they can blame Democrats for it.

We believe that elected officials should always be prepared to defend the decisions they make, and  tragedies can serve to highlight the impact of those decisions.

However, what should never happen is shaming of the victims and their loved ones.

Which brings us to the catastrophic floods in Texas that have claimed dozens of lives with many people, including young girls attending a summer camp, still missing.

Seeing how this happened in a red state, and the one perhaps most responsible for the United States’ addiction to fossil fuels, there are some who are saying that, if people don’t want to experience ever-worsening natural disasters, then they should stop voting for the party that denies that climate change is happening and that wants to remove the government experts whose job it is to forecast these types of catastrophic events.

Let’s be clear, anybody who even hints at that is a heartless ghoul.

Above, for example, is a social media post from the editor-in-chief of the partisan media company MeidasTouch that is uncalled for.

If you want to criticize Sens. Ted Cruz and John Cornyn for their politics, and that’s fair. You want to point fingers at Donald Trump and Elon Musk for cutting the staff of the National Weather Service or wanting to eliminate FEMA so that billionaires like them can get a tax cut that they don’t need, and that is perfectly justified.

But to say that the loved ones of young girls who died in a flood should have voted for somebody other than the above is not only heartless, it is also counterproductive.

Because, at a time of the greatest political division in generations, that kind of comment only reinforces the belief of Trump supporters that those on the left are terrible people.

And, in this case, they would be right.

In his Navigating the Insanity columns, Klaus Marre provides the kind of hard-hitting, thought-provoking, and often humorous analysis you won’t find anywhere else.