Ah, the never-ending ideological schizophrenia of the right-wing media types. Like the Pravda of old, they force every big news event through some bent, warped sieve of political righteousness that twists each headline into some damnation of the treasonous, anti-American left. The Conservative Comintern's lastest game of media twister is played out on the fire-ravaged ridges of Southern California, where hundreds of thousands of citizens are fleeing for their lives.
This prompted Glenn Beck of CNN - a phrase that in itself should scare every shareholder in the vast Time Warner empire - to root the flames onward:
“I think there is a handful of people who hate America. Unfortunately for them, a lot of them are losing their homes in a forest fire today.”
Yeah, those lefty America-hating schoolkids massed in safety zones like football stadiums in San Diego surrounded by water canons to protect their lives. See, it's a reliably blue state, California. Deserves the burn. And anyway, it's the fault of those no-good "enviro-nitwits" - so says Michele Malkin, who was actually too extreme for FoxNews and lost her battle with Gerald, and her job as a result. She whines that "lawsuits have tied up the president’s Healthy Forests Initiative passed in 2003," basically arguing that you can't have a distrastrous forest fire without, uh, trees. So cut 'em down, tree-huggers:
Environmentalists blame global warming for the problem, but guess who’s standing in the way of a solution?
Maybe it's our neighbors in Mexico (which sent 50 firefighters to help battle the blazes), as some are wondering on that mainstream, super-popular conservative blog FreeRepublic, where one posting today asks that right-wing rhetorical question:
How does the fire know to stop at the mexican border? I’d wager that illegals are lighting them to help out their amigos in getting through.
Jon Swift finds that the ole perfessor of the right - Glenn Reynolds - links approvingly to some blogger manque who goes by the name Jammie Wearing Fool, who defends the CNN anchor: "It's Beck's opinion that some who hate America live in that area. Is this even debatable?"
Not to Beck, who dug a deeper hole for himself by blaming liberal bloggers for somehow twisting his words:
...unfortunately, some people want to think the worst. But thinking the worst doesn't make it real. Thinking the worst doesn't change an illusion into reality. I just can't believe that I live in a country where I have to explain that.
Which only earned him this epee wound to the chest from swift sword of Digby:
I can't believe I live in a country where anyone who talks like that is paid big bucks to be on the radio and TV.
UPDATE: As John Cole adds: "Hopefully, Glenn Beck is running the numbers and we will know shortly how many of those 1,400 homes deserved to burn."
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