But while I count innumerable blessings that Ian’s Category 4 landing spared the Tampa Bay Area, it would be unforgivably coarse not to think on our neighbors in Lee County — a two-hour drive down Interstate 75 — with empathy. Fort Myers Beach, until Wednesday a quaint strip of old Florida on a Gulf Coast barrier island, was all but swept away.

The fishing pier that marked the heart of the community is a skeleton of pilings. Witnesses have remarked on watery holes where houses used to be. 

In Central Florida, folks who never guessed they needed flood insurance saw their family rooms waist-deep in stormwater.

In short, Ian was brutal. Rebuilding will take years, accompanied by rethinking among policymakers about how and where and, if we’re rational, why. Those who dodged the bullet — again — would do well to pay attention; continuing to pursue wise steps now will mitigate the worst when the winds at last blow unfavorably. 

OK, sure. It’s easy to be dispassionate when, for the 101st consecutive year (knock wood), your region has been spared a direct hit by The Big One. Which means I can sit in my philosopher’s gaming chair and add this:

I am perturbed about how Ian’s impact on Florida is being characterized. Not on the property damage front, to be sure. Everything you have read or seen regarding the swath cut by the storm through the heart of the state is accurate. The devastation is, as reported, stunning, staggering, catastrophic, and historic.

We’re talking, instead, about people killed as a result of the storm. Rebuilding will happen. Stuff is replaceable. Lives are not.

In the face of this destruction, what we absolutely can do without — in Florida or anywhere else — is political hyperbole.

We’re not certain which sources President Biden reviewed Thursday before he grimly forecast Ian could become the “deadliest hurricane in Florida’s history” during a media conference with FEMA officials. The death total, he projected, would be “substantial.”

The president’s handwringing — the deadliest in Florida’s history — is aggressively wrong. Is it cynical to think it’s purposely wrong?

We mourn the lost, naturally. With officials still performing calculations Friday afternoon, Ian’s dead number at least 14 and maybe 21. That’s a lot of funerals and enduring heartache for surviving loved ones.

But it is nowhere near historic levels.

The roughly two dozen dead would have to be multiplied by 100 to even begin to approach the lives taken (at least 2,500) in the Okeechobee storm of 1928. Indeed, energetic measures by Florida officials, who are experienced hands at this stuff, and wise decisions by the vast majority of those within the dread Cone of Uncertainty have limited casualties by hurricanes in recent decades.

But convenient manhandling of history is a classic tactic of the left: If the facts don’t support your narrative — unprepared GOP governor and administration — make ‘em up.

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis wasn’t having it. “I know that people have said certain things,” DeSantis said. “I don’t think we will be anywhere approaching [record numbers].”

This may seem like a small thing. Maybe the president hyped the dread to emphasize the need for federal aid. But in the internet age, false and misleading statements routinely pass for fact. When Lee County Sheriff Carmine Marceno reflexively predicted deaths in the hundreds in his jurisdiction alone, amateur journalists were spreading that guess as gospel within minutes.

Erroneously projecting record-setting mortality onto a state that has two headline contests on the ballot — governor and U.S. senator — in less than six weeks may have been nothing more than another Biden goof. Nobody bumbles off-script like the current commander-in-chief.

When the bumbling does his party a service, however, shenanigans must be called.