California’s burning and its political foes are practically dancing in the flames and reveling in the ashes.
From the mountains to the sea, the wreckage and ruin are biblical in size, scope and wall-to-wall destruction.
At least five people are dead. Thousands of structures have been laid to waste. More than 130,000 people have fled for their lives. For some perspective, that’s as though the entire population of Billings, Mt.; Allentown, Pa.; or West Palm Beach, Fla., had suddenly picked up and moved en masse.
And the menace isn’t nearly ended. The winds stoking the wildfires are forecast to pick up once more and bellow for more than a day’s length. Things seem destined to grow worse across a wide swath of Los Angeles and its besieged neighbors. Much worse.
And yet the response from the nation’s incoming president and many of his political allies has been utterly devoid of caring or compassion. In their haste to score points and politicize one of the worst natural disasters in California history, most haven’t even bothered offering the ritual hopes and prayers.
Donald Trump taunted “Gov. Gavin Newscum,” lambasted President Biden and trotted out old canards about wasted water supposedly flowing to the ocean. (The state’s reservoirs are actually at or above their historic levels.)
Richard Grenell, who was recently named Trump’s envoy for “special missions,” claimed “the far-left policies of Democrats in California are literally burning us to the ground.”
Utah’s Republican Sen. Mike Lee blamed the devastation on an overweening environmental sensitivity that puts the survival of “tiny fish” ahead of the lives and livelihoods of suffering residents.
And on.
It’s not only unseemly, as the toll mounts and fresh hell rains on Southern California.
It’s unprecedented.
“I can’t think of a president, Republican or Democrat, that has tried to inject partisan politics into an ongoing disaster relief effort,” said Dan Schnur, who served as a communications strategist for former California GOP Gov. Pete Wilson and now teaches at USC, UC Berkeley and Pepperdine.
“Presidents of both parties have always said very harsh and very nasty things about the other party,” Schnur noted. “But we’ve never had a president, or a president-elect for that matter, start taking shots while people are still in danger.”
The falsehoods and misinformation are bad enough.
“I will demand that this incompetent governor allow beautiful, clean, fresh water to FLOW INTO CALIFORNIA!” Trump wrote on social media. “He is [to] blame.”
(This after threatening to withhold federal disaster aid should California’s leaders refuse to give more water to farmers and cities, at the expense of the environment and others denied their share.)
In fact, Mother Nature bears much of the responsibility for the fiery apocalypse. You could kill every Delta smelt that ever passed water through its gills — to name a threatened species that conservatives love to flog for a lack of dam-building — and it wouldn’t have made the slightest difference these last few horrific days.
A parching lack of rainfall extended the fire season into the normally wet month of January. Fierce winds grounded helicopters and other aircraft during the crucial early hours after several blazes started, exploding their size and spreading embers like flaming confetti for miles around.
The steep topography stymied firefighters, who were overmatched, along with the region’s safety infrastructure. (You can blame the latter on the lack of investment and a persistent mentality that scrimps on prevention until it’s proved too late.)
However, California’s critics won’t let those facts stop them from grinding their axes, or promoting their agendas.
Worse, though, is the utter lack of humanity. It’s a measure, as if we needed yet another, of the depravity of our current politics.
“We, as a country, have a road map for this,” said Kristin Taylor, a professor at Wayne State University who has written extensively about the politics of natural disaster. It involves empathy and a lot of federal support, she said, which “sends a big signal that the government’s here and we’ve got your back.”
Trump, by contrast, regards the firestorm “as a political opportunity to stick it to Gavin Newsom. And to stick it to a state that didn’t vote for him,” Taylor said. “And using disasters and disaster response as leverage for punishing political foes is brand spanking for new for us.”
Leave it — improbably — to Ron DeSantis, the governor of Florida and Gavin Newsom’s arch nemesis, to remind us how politicians used to respond to calamity.
“Our prayers are with everyone affected by the horrific fires in Southern California,” said DeSantis, who has overseen his state’s response to numerous deadly hurricanes. “When disaster strikes, we must come together to help our fellow Americans in any way we can. The state of Florida has offered help to assist the people of California in responding to these fires and in rebuilding communities that have been devastated.”
Compare DeSantis to Rep. Andy Biggs, an Arizona Republican who took to the right-leaning Newsmax network to parrot the wasted-water fallacy and attack the Federal Emergency Management Agency with a false claim it diverted nearly $2 billion in relief money for “illegal alien care.”
What comes to mind are the famous words of attorney Joseph Welch, who verbally decapitated Joseph McCarthy in a nationally televised congressional hearing that brought the Wisconsin senator’s reckless and cruel Red-baiting crusade to an abrupt and deserved end.
“Have you no sense of decency, sir, at long last?” Welch said. “Have you left no sense of decency?”
