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California burning
Saturday, October 27, 2007
By Ellis Washington
While California burns down,
Harry Reid, from D.C. town,
Blames global warming,
Cries, "It's so alarming!"
But Rush proved Reid's a clown.~ Paul (a poet and reader of my WND column)
Last Tuesday at a press conference, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid made the ludicrous claim that the wildfires presently raging throughout Southern California were due to politics – that global warming was at least partly responsible for the blazes. "One reason why we have the fires in Southern California is global warming," the Nevada Democrat told reporters, emphasizing the need to pass the Democrats' comprehensive energy package presently stalled in Congress.
A few minutes later in that same interview, the venerable senator was forced to retract his global warming theory by lying, obfuscating and saying he never said what everybody had heard him just say openly on TV. And Congress wonders why their approval ratings hover around single digits?
"Pressed by astonished reporters on whether he really believed global warming caused the fires, he appeared to back away from his comments, saying there are many factors that contributed to the disaster," reported WorldNetDaily.
At first I was outraged at Sen. Reid for once again trying to advance his myopic political agenda on the backs of the victims of a natural disaster. (Remember how the Democrats shamelessly politicized the Hurricane Katrina tragedy in Louisiana? Rapper Kayne West on national TV ranted: "George Bush doesn't care about black people!") But then I had a moment of pause.
It does seem that California has more than its share of wildfires – more than any other place on Earth. Could there possibly be some public policy reasons why there are so many fires in California notwithstanding Sen. Reid's preposterous global warming fairytales?
As I was listening to the Laura Ingraham radio show earlier this week, the discussion was about the terrible California wildfires. One caller was a smokejumper from Montana. Speaking with unusual clarity and rationality, he tersely stated some of the reasons why California has so many wildfires:
- Radical liberal environmentalist policies prohibit controlled burning of heavily forested areas. Big tree-logging companies need not apply!
- Years and years of dormant undergrowth in the forests provide perfect kindling for a fire-prone environment like California.
- The notorious Santa Ana winds, which during this time of year whip through Southern California, can reach speeds of up to 100 mph. (which are hurricane speeds).
- Two hundred years ago, much of California was a desert in its natural state with few residents. Since then the land has become increasingly populated. Moreover, for the past 50 years that state has had a building boom of lavish mansions and expensive homes built right in the middle of unnatural, man-made forested areas;
- People have planted trees, shrubs, grasses and plants around their homes that are not native to California and are very combustible. (For example, the caller suggested that the popular eucalyptus tree is neither native to California nor fire retardant)
Regarding the equally devastating California wildfires of 2003, in a revealing article published July 2003 in "Environmental News" by James Taylor, the writer discovered that the majority of the federal forest thinning proposals were tied up in needless and costly litigation by environmental Nazis. Taylor writes:
The GAO examined 762 U.S. Forest Service proposals to thin forests and prevent fires during the past two years. According to the study, slightly more than half the proposals were not subject to third-party appeal. Of those proposals subject to appeal, third parties challenged 59 percent.Appeals were filed most often by anti-logging groups, including the Sierra Club, Alliance for Wild Rockies and Forest Conservation Council. According to the GAO, 84 interest groups filed more than 400 appeals of Forest Service proposals. The appeals delayed efforts to treat 900,000 acres of forests and cost the federal government millions of dollars to address.
Forest Service officials estimate they spend nearly half their time, and $250 million each year, preparing for the appeals and procedural challenges launched by activists.
On Thursday, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger was promised billions of dollars in taxpayer dollars by the Bush administration (Schwarzenegger prefers the term "loan") to deal with this catastrophe of biblical proportions. However, I wonder, will the governor listen to that Montana smokejumper and urge the Legislature to pass mandatory controlled forest burning, undergrowth removal and clear-cutting policies? Don't hold your breath.
In an earlier column, I traced the triumph of the State over We the People back 75 years ago to FDR's unprecedented four term as president (1933-45). I surmise it is at that point in history when these radical environmentalist policies grew out FDR's New Deal programs, which have, since the 1970s, flourished and grown exponentially.
Regarding the apotheosis of Big Government, I wrote the following:
What is FDR's legacy to America? In a word, Tyranny. C.S. Lewis put it is thusly:"Of all tyrannies, a tyranny exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It may be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end, for they do so with the approval of their consciences."
FDR taught America to forsake the three things that made her great – free-market capitalism, its Judeo-Christian traditions and rugged American individualism. How? By pitting church against state, sacred against secular, men against women, race against race, rich against poor, creed against creed, Jew against Gentile, liberals against conservatives, class against class, the haves against the have nots. ...
As millions of my fellow Americans watch the tragedy of California burning, I must add one more achievement of FDR's socialist revolution. He made common-sense public policy the servant of Machiavellian political expediency and pandered to small, shrill, extremist special-interest groups, all at the expense of the legitimate constitutional rights of We the People. Environmentalist, in the words of C.S. Lewis, are one of many present day "omnipotent moral busybodies" that "torment us for our own good."
In Roman antiquity, there was a prescient aphorism that stood for 2,000 years as a monument to bureaucratic arrogance, stupidity and ineptitude – "Nero fiddled while Rome burned." In modern parlance, it could be iterated: As Sen. Harry Reid spews out nitwit global warming propaganda, California burned.
Ellis Washington, former editor at The Michigan Law Review and law clerk at The Rutherford Institute, is a graduate of John Marshall Law School and a lecturer and freelance writer on constitutional law, legal history, political philosophy and critical race theory. He has written over a dozen law review articles and several books, including "The Inseparability of Law and Morality:
The Constitution, Natural Law and the Rule of Law" (2002), "Beyond the Veil:
Essays in the Dialectical Style of Socrates" and He has just completed the manuscript to his latest book, "The Nuremberg Trials: Last Tragedy of the Holocaust" (2007).
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