While Colorado burns, conservatives have looked for ways to blame it on President Obama.
Some of the same people who have bashed the president as a big government, big spending liberal now say a wildfire that destroyed hundreds of homes in the conservative stronghold of Colorado Springs can be blamed on the president because he has been too slow to spend money to beef up the federal fleet of air tankers.
The meme began more than a week ago when pundit Michelle Malkin, who lives in Colorado Springs, wrote a piece for the National Review Online titled “Obama Bureaucrats Are Fueling Wildfires.”
“The Obama administration’s neglect of the federal government’s aerial-tanker fleet raises acrid questions about its core public-safety priorities,” she wrote.
If Colorado Springs sounds familiar to readers, that's because two years ago I was pointing out how the Tea Party had taken over the city and drastically cut city services, including streetlights, park cleanup, the local transit system...and oh yes, city workers including police and firefighters. Colorado Springs was in fact held up as a model of the new Tea Party governance style and how it would revolutionize America.
Cut to today, where the city is facing a horrific tragedy with massive wildfires ravaging the suburbs and thousands having to evacuate...including Malkin and her family. Her immediate reaction? Obama's fault, of course. It always is.
A reasonable person would have asked "Hey, have we cut spending on things like fire prevention, forestry monitoring, and firefighters lately?" But of course, we're talking about Malkin here. If her house should have tragically burned down (and let's be honest here, Michelle Malkin is a boil on the ass of humanity but nothing she says or prints rates having her house destroyed and her family uprooted like this) you think she would be grateful for government to assist her in a time like this. This is what government is for.
Nope. You will see more of this, as disasters like this will prove not that the proper response to climate change and increasingly costly disasters is intelligent prevention steps, but to scream, cry, and eliminate as much of the infrastructure preventing tragedies like this anyway just to say "Well the system clearly failed us here so why have common government at all? You're on your own."
Once again, the lesson of Colorado Springs to wingers is "since government can never prevent 100% of all disasters, government is a failure."
The rest of us get to pay for such stupidity. A little prevention there, by us voting, goes a long way, folks. This is what Republican government gets you, and it really is a failure. It's designed to fail, actually. Watch. The solution from sity officials will be "if we had only privatized more of the city functions sooner and fired more city workers, we could have had the money to prevent this tragedy..." Revenue increases? What are those? They don't exist.
Pretty soon that won't be sarcasm. It will be fact. But you have a say in how your city, county, state, and country are run. I suggest you register and vote.
Before that's "cut" too.
No comments:
Post a Comment