If you’re like me, some of what is said on the right is questionable but, given the sheer volume of claims, hard to check – at least, like me, you’re a working dude and that’s not your gig. So, for instance, here’s Erick Erickson bulging his eyes over this:
“February was the wettest month in downtown Los Angeles since 1998. With over 12 inches of rain drenching the city, it was the fourth-wettest February — and the seventh-wettest month overall — in the city’s nearly 150-year recorded history.” Judson Jones reported on Los Angeles’s weather on March 2, 2024, in the New York Times. Just under a year later, Los Angeles is on fire and the fire hydrants have run dry from a lack of water. Yes, a city by the sea does not have enough water.
… is disquieting.
But the mainstream media has fired back. Here’s WaPo’s Philip Bump:
That line about the hydrants is, like many of the attacks that have unfolded over the past 24 hours, rooted in something real. Hydrants near some of the blazes that are ripping through neighborhoods around the city have failed to produce water. On CNN, an official with the Los Angeles Fire Department explained that this was because so much water had been pulled from local reservoirs that were intended to battle house fires, not wildfires. Other experts have noted that high demand can cause pressure in the system of hydrants to drop, making it harder to extract the water.
And then Bump goes on to note:
But this is a political fight, not a debate over resources and systems. So Trump and his allies cherry-pick things that are unrelated to the struggle to contain the flames and present them as the real reasons that houses are burning down, particularly if those unrelated things serve as indictments of other perceived elements of left-wing politics.
It’s natural to suggest solutions after disaster strikes, hoping to obviate, or at least mitigate, repetitions of the occurrence. However, glossing over relevant facts is not helpful, but something political partisans, who are generally perceived as being more interested in political victory than in honest analysis of a problem that may be at odds with their model of how humanity and the world works.
And are the conservatives engaged in this? Here’s Kevin Drum’s analysis:
Unprecedented disasters will always strain resources to the breaking point. There might be incompetence or ordinary mistakes involved, but usually not. The Pacific Palisades fire, whipped up by 60 mph winds, destroyed the entire neighborhood in a day. Nothing would have stopped it. LA firefighters were like a squirt gun in the face of something like that. In terms of the immediate response, there’s no one to blame and no incompetence at play. Everyone needs to quit looking for politically convenient scapegoats.
How about post-massacre suggestions that gun control be brought back? The conservatives simply see this as a political attack on one of their key positions, a near-religious tenet that must not be questioned; a more scary related point is that federal funding of research on the impact of guns on society was banned years ago, and I forget if that sorry bit of legislation has been repealed or not.
Not incidentally, conservatives whine about politicizing school massacres, but clearly politicization of state reaction to the Los Angeles weather disaster is Erickson’s doing. So why does one side get to do it, complete with omitted facts, while the other side does not?
Folks who do not face existential consequences for mistakes in this or that arena will begin treating that arena as a place to play games, and not act like adults. Social prestige is a powerful attractant. Keep that in mind when analyzing crap like Erickson’s.
