The Usual Suspects

--by Sara

It must be lovely to be a right-winger. When it comes time to assign blame for anything -- hurricanes, Abu Ghraib, Pete Stark -- you can keep your beautiful mind spotlessly untainted by simply pulling out your list of Usual Suspects, picking one or two or a handful, and then slinging the invective in that general direction. No messy facts required; not a moment wasted in reasonable reflection. It's all right there on the list. You can aim your hate in a few easy seconds, and then get right back to your squash game. It just saves so much time for other things....

Last year, in the throes of l'affaire Foley, we actually kept score of who got blamed as the various excuses emerged over the course of a week or so. Apart from its tedious predictability, watching them fling the blame here and there had roughly the same entertainment value as watching monkeys flinging poo. You could see their mouths moving as they hurled it with everything they had, silently praying this one would stick to something that didn't smell Republican. (In the end, of course, that's about all it stuck to.) By the end of that fling-filled week, the finally tally of attempted targets looked like this:

The Democrats
CREW
The GOP Gay Cabal
The Catholic Church
Nancy Pelosi
Eve Ensler
Bill Clinton
Booze
Porn
Tolerance and diversity training
The pages themselves
Their parents

And, as we stood by and kept count, our intrepid commenters made up a handy list of Suspects To Be Named Later, so we'd have it ready to hand when the next conservative blamefest started up:

Evolution
Abortion
Immigration
Secular Humanism
Feminism
Iran
Canada
Al Qaida
The NAACP
Organized labor
The Liberal Media and
George Soros who not only counts for himself but also
The International Zionist Conspiracy
The Freemasons
The UN Oil for Food program
Hybrid Cars
Industrial Hemp
Hugo Chavez
Lesbians
Witches
Harry Potter

And here we are. Today, right on schedule, with the Bushies once again trying to do a quick fly-over maneuver to evade responsibility, the blame for the San Diego fires has already started falling thicker than the layers of ash on Escondido. Which means it's time, once again, to start rounding up The Usual Suspects. Let's get started.

Michelle Malkin is out front today blaming environmentalists. According to Bustardblog:

Today, Michelle "Just Make stuff up" Malkin explains how the left is to blame for the fires in California:

Environmentalists blame global warming for the problem, but guess who’s standing in the way of a solution?

Litigious environmentalists

Needless to say it's a sleazy smear from start to finish.

Actually, the start is not so bad. The first quote is a simple description of what is happening from Yahoo news. Her second quotation comes from a regional newspaper, and she is pretty selective. It starts:

Wildfires thrive in hot, dry weather. But the conditions also contribute to the die-off of trees, which must compete for water in forests that have become unnaturally dense because of a century of misguided fire suppression. Once dead and brittle, the trees become more fuel for catastrophic fires.

She ignored the two sentences immediately before those sentences:

The increased severity and length of fires seasons comes as the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change reports a clear pattern of temperatures nationwide. The hotter weather is coupled with predictions of decreased precipitation in the Southwest..

Another sentence in the same short article she forgot to quote:

The nation's worsening fire seasons are, in part, a consequence of global warming and are likely to get more severe unless forest managers step up tree removal efforts and prescribed fire programs, a group of scientists testified Monday before a congressional panel.

For her money quote, the one she uses to "prove" that the fires are the fault of environmentalists, she goes to a thoroughly corrupt source for an article it published more than four years ago. The quote comes from the Heartland Institute, a foundation financed in large part by tobacco, oil and auto interests. Not surprisingly, the "scientists" of the institute consider Al Gore and Global Warming fraudulent. Their favorite "environmental scientist" is of course funded by Exxon. The institute also promotes school choice, "free market health care," and defends smoking. They assert that:

The public health community's campaign to demonize smokers and all forms of tobacco is based on junk science.

Junk sources are what Malkin relies on for her posts.

Think Progress, on the other hand, caught Fox News trying to blame, uh, Al Qaida:

This morning on Fox News, hosts of the show Fox and Friends blamed the wildfires in California on a new culprit: al Qaeda. They pointed to a 2003 FBI memo, which raised the possibility that al Qaeda may try to set wildfires around the western United States. They also noted that men in a “hovering helicopter” saw “a guy starting one of these fires.”....Later in the segment, host Steve Doocy acknowledged that in memo, al Qaeda didn’t even mention California. “They mention Colorado, Montana, Utah, and Wyoming,” he added.

Over at Pandagon, Pam Spaulding quoted closeted gay fundamentalist firebrand James Hartline blaming (who else?) Teh Gay:

They shook their fists at God and said, “We don't care what God says, we will issue our legal brief to support gay marriage in San Diego!” Then Mayor Jerry Sanders mocked the Christian vote and signed off on this rebellious legal document to support same-sex marriage.

And then the streets of La Jolla under the Mt. Soledad Cross began to cave in.

They shook their fists at God and said, “We don't care what the Bible says, We want the California school children indoctrinated into homosexuality!” And then Governor Schwarzenegger signed into law the heinous SB777 which bans the use of “mom” and “dad” in the text books and promotes homosexuality to all school children in California.

And then the wildfires of Southern California engulfed the land like a raging judgment against the radicalized anti-christian California rebels.

How low will we go?

Why won't they listen?

Why won't they stop their madness? The Bible says that in the last days, the nations will rebel against God until He can't take it anymore. Was it all worth it? Were the few years of sexual immorality worth the eternal destruction and earthly chaos it brought? How low will we go?

Add in Glenn Beck's outburst the other day, and our new 2007 San Diego Fire list of Usual Suspects now includes:

Hollywood liberals
Environmentalists
Al Qaida
Homosexuals

Stay tuned -- and don't forget, you're invited to play along at home!