After the catastrophic flooding and terrible loss of life in Texas over the weekend, some in the media tried to turn the natural disaster into a political “gotcha,” a move that Charlie Cooke, on today’s edition of The Editors, describes as abhorrent.

“There is no evidence whatsoever,” says Charlie, “that this horrible event had anything whatsoever to do with who won the last election federally or with who runs Texas.”

He believes this “correlation game” is embraced by three groups of people: “The first group of people is akin to conspiracy theorists in that they are intellectually and emotionally incapable of looking at something bad happening without needing a pat explanation or causation or person to blame. The second group is full of people who are so addled by politics that they genuinely believe that everything that happens in the United States is the product of political choices. And the third group are cynics, people who know that this isn’t Donald Trump’s fault or DOGE’s fault or Greg Abbott’s fault, that bad things do sometimes happen to good people, but who understand that there is a political margin here to be made by pretending otherwise.

“Irrespective of the impetus for this,” says Charlie, “it is stupid and it makes our politics worse and I resent those people who do it.

“This is a terrible tragedy in which Americans lost their lives, and the attempt to make it into something else disgusts me here as it does everywhere else.”

The Editors podcast is recorded on Tuesdays and Fridays every week and is available wherever you listen to podcasts.