The thing that I fundamentally just don’t get about W’s popularity was brought home by his speech on Thursday on the recent fires out west. The quote below is a complete transcript of the snippet on NPR:
We need to thin. We need to make our forests healthy by using some common sense. We need to understand if you let kindling build up and there’s a lightning strike, you’re goin’ to get yourself a big fire, that’s what we got to understand. We gotta understand that it makes sense to clear brush, we gotta make sense… make sense to encourage people to ensure that the forest is not only healthy from disease, but healthy from fire. That’s what we gotta do here in America, we haven’t done that in the past. We just haven’t done it, and we’re now paying the price.
This is one of those few cases when I’ve got no disagreement with what GWB is saying; I’m not a forest policy expert, but I’ve been hearing this for years. US policy for generations has been to stop every fire, every time, as quickly as possible. Which lets all sorts of kindling build up, and so instead of dozens of manageable fires, you get annual Armageddons. For this reason, the Forest Service actually sets more fires than it puts out, in order to thin down the kindling. It was one of these “managed fires” that got out of control and threatened Los Alamos.
But the speech wasn’t lauding existing forest policy, it was an introduction of the new Bush plan to thin the forests by shredding hunks of regulations and handing timberland over to industry. “Clear out the underbrush,” the new policy goes, “and you can keep that timber as well as some other trees you feel like picking up.” (Differing reports are saying different things about what the policy hands over to the timber industry that isn’t underbrush.)
Which leads to the first thing I don’t get about W’s approval. This entire administration is marked by rampant political opportunism that would make Bill Clinton blush, and only leftwing nutcases like myself seem to notice. The tax cut, originally proposed as a return of the “people’s money” when times were good and revenues were high, first become “necessary due to the recession”, and then a matter of “economic security.” September 11th is the retroactive justification for dozens of pet projects on the Bush 2001 agenda.
And now the west is burning, people are scared, and Bush promises to do something, on the assumption that no one’s going to notice the dispatch of US property to private interests. Based on past experience, he’s probably right.
What makes this even more interesting is that for the first time, a coalition of western state governments and environmental groups have already hammered out a plan to thin underbrush without corporate giveaways. This is a region that is spectacularly suspicious of federal government intrusion. Bush and many of the western governors are Republicans, the “state’s rights” and “get the feds outta my business” party. It will be interesting to see how many of them conveniently ignore that aspect of their philosophy.
But the thing that really nails me is how happy people are with the Dr. Seussization of domestic and international politics. Our enemies are all evil. Terrorists hate freedom. We just gotta clear underbrush. To hell with how. Apparently, if you serve up complex issues in an oversimplified fashion, and deliver them in a folksy, downhome, aw-shucks fashion, you too can be a popular president.
Albert Einstein is quoted as saying, “We should make everything as simple as possible, but no simpler.” The only things missing from current political debate are bright illustrations in primary colors.