Liberal Democrats really are soulless creatures. This week, they tried to throw gasoline on a politically combustible catastrophe in Southern California. Fortunately, our country was rescued by cool clean facts. Why don’t Democrat political leaders have even the slightest regard for the truth? Where is their compassion?
While thousands of California families are combing through ashes where their homes once stood, my anger toward the Democrats grows, blowing as hot and hard as the Santa Ana winds that leveled 2,000 homes, stripping so many people of their lives, their possessions and their pets.
First to toss a verbal grenade was Democrat Sen. Barbara Boxer of California – bemoaning the fact that the fires could not be properly fought because President Bush had so many of our National Guardsman in Iraq fighting that “illegal, immoral, unjust war.”
California’s Democratic Lt. Gov. John Garamendi joined the hazing of the federal government’s response to the firestorms, calling President Bush’s planned visit to the front lines of the fire a “public relations” stunt.
“I’ve got some doubt about the value of President Bush coming out here,” Garamendi told MSNBC’s “Hardball.” “I just hope … he brings more than he brought to New Orleans.”
When Mr. Bush was slow to survey the damage caused by Hurricane Katrina – citing his concern that he might be in the way of rescue efforts – he was blasted by Democrats and the media, alike.
But Democrat politico John Garamendi wasn’t done carrying the water for the party of the jackass, joining Boxer in insisting that the state’s firefighting efforts had been hampered by the Iraq war. Oh, really?
MSNBC’s Tamron Hall pointed out to Garamendi that there were still 17,000 National Guardsmen in California and just 3,000 in Iraq, but Democrats don’t like to let facts get in the way of their shameless political posturing. When even the liberal media call a Democrat on their political grandstanding, you know they’ve gone too far.
You can count on the Dems to keep overreaching – and right on cue was Sen. Harry Reid, blaming the Southern California fires on President Bush’s unwillingness to combat global warming. Reid announced to the news media: “As you know, one reason that we have the fires burning in Southern California is global warming.”
Maybe I didn’t study hard enough in the government-run public schools, but I thought the reason we have fires in Southern California in the fall is the result of historical weather patterns. Southern California summers are typically periods with little rainfall, a pattern that goes back for at least hundreds of years. The fire danger then rises when hot, dry Santa Ana winds come sweeping down the mountains and canyons of Southern California and turn what would be minor spot fires into raging infernos that char hundreds of thousands of acres.
Liberals seem to have conveniently forgotten that the Santa Anas have been a late autumn phenomenon in Southern California long before George Bush stole the 2000 election from Al Gore.
Pop music singer Belinda Carlisle, an avowed liberal who has lavished praise on Democrat Speaker Nancy Pelosi, famously sang about these ferociously hot winds in her 1989 Top 40 hit, “Summer Rain”:
I remember the rain on his skin
and his kisses hotter than the Santa Ana winds.
I decided to dig further back in time to find the proof behind the Democrats’ “global-warming-caused-by-George-Bush-causes-devastating-fires” conspiracy.
You can imagine how baffled I was when I came across this snippet from an article from the New York Times, the bastion of liberal truth, dated Nov. 19, 1980:
2 Brush Fires Still Out of Control as Winds Die Down
The Santa Ana winds that drove brush fires across 50,000 acres of Southern California diminished to almost nothing today, but two of the three fires remained uncontrolled for a third day.
Santa Ana winds causing fires in 1980? How can that be?
Was Ronald Reagan part of the cause of these global-warming induced fires (along with George H. W. Bush, Bill Clinton and George W. Bush)?
I decided to dig even further back in time.
I found this story from the Washington Post dated Aug. 9, 1977. For those of you who forgot, Jimmy Carter was president back then (and who wouldn’t want to forget that?)
Vicious Cycle: Drought and Fire
But every precaution may prove insufficient if California’s long summer remains dry. The traditional month of greatest fire danger is September, when the dry Santa Ana winds in Southern California make fire containment a near impossibility.
Truth: The Santa Ana winds have been a meteorological phenomenon dating back hundreds of years. The origin of the name for these hot dry winds is a topic of debate. Wikipedia attributes the name to a reporter in 1901 who dropped an “a” from his reporting on the “Santana Winds.”
The Los Angeles Times similarly published an account from a reader who said that the name originates with Francisco Coronado and other Spanish explorers who referred to the Los Vientos de Santanas – which translates into “Winds of the Devil.”
The problem for Democrats is that Coronado and his compatriots were exploring the world during the 1500s.
It will take quite a family tree to find out how George Bush, Ronald Reagan, evil conservatives or manufacturing companies have anything to do with winds that are at least as old as the wrinkles on Helen Thomas’ face.
In the meantime, the rest of us will be properly focused on trying to help the victims of these fires, standing with our faces to the Winds of the Devils while turning our backs on the Democrats and their shameful political game-playing. I have in mind a hotter place than the fires of Southern California for the liberal Democrat politicians who lie about, and exploit, such human tragedy.
