Yesterday, someone asked me why I haven't been talking more about the California wildfires. That person said the story was all over the news, on all the cable channels, so why wasn't I writing more about it?

Simple.

Because these days, we can't even get the bodies in the ground after a disaster before a heated debate over every aspect of the unfolding tragedy becomes grist for the political mill. Ideally, we'd wait for horror shows like the California fires to end and then let the experts and Congressional committees do methodical research on how we can prevent similar situations from occurring, allow them to report their conclusions, and then go from there

But instead, what we get is shrill, immediate, almost laughably partisan attempts for people to tie what's happening into their political agendas. In a better world, those sort of transparent tactics would fail miserably, but the sad reality is that they work.

Katrina was a perfect example of that. The Democrats and their allies in the media, almost from the day of the storm, set out to use Katrina as a club to beat George Bush with. Day in and day out, the MSM put out wildly inaccurate reports about what was going on in New Orleans, the countless failures of the local government were ignored while FEMA's successes were ignored, FEMA was treated as if it was supposed to be the first responder after a disaster, and bizarro world pronouncements about Bush hating black people were treated as if they were credible.

That's why you can only try to avoid getting into partisan poo flinging contests for so long when events like the California wildfires happen -- because the most laughable memes, like global warming was responsible for the fires, will be spread everywhere and become conventional wisdom if they're not vigorously challenged.

So, be happy there isn't a lot about the wildfires on RWN right now. You'll probably get tired of reading about them after the Democrats send out some orphaned 5 year old to plead for 200 billion dollars in new taxes to fight the global warming that "caused" the wildfires or the lefty bloggers start claiming that Bush deliberately let California burn because there are a lot of Hispanics there and he hates Hispanic people.