Back Talk

He underestimated the extent to which a partisan can stretch in order to trash the opposition. A reporter stated yesterday that he planned to ask Governor Schwarzenegger whether he thought President Bush was culpable for the extent of the Southern California firestorm because he had sent our National Guard troops to fight in Iraq making them unavailable to help fight the fires. Now this whiz kid, who is tasked with reporting the news to us, is so anxious to hop onto the “blame Bush bandwagon,” that it failed to register with him that the California National Guard, even given all the periodic wildfires of which we suffer, are never used to fight fires. I understand our wonderful Senator, Barbara Boxer, also lurched onto the bandwagon and made the same misinformed claim. This is a very Katrina-esque press response to a crisis; after Katrina – and continuing today – the press rushed to blame the President for the slow recovery rather than nail the true culprits: the inept New Orleans mayor, the do-nothing governor, and the notoriously corrupt city government. Louisiana Congressman Democrat William Jefferson even got in on the act when he used a helicopter that should have been rescuing stranded people to ferry him to his estate to retrieve personal items. Good old William, sometimes called “cold cash Jefferson” because he had $85 thousand hidden in his freezer, was later indicted for racketeering, soliciting bribes and money-laundering,