Today, Michelle "Just Make stuff up" Malkin explains how the left is to blame for the fires in California:
Environmentalists blame global warming for the problem, but guess who’s standing in the way of a solution?
Litigious environmentalists
Needless to say it's a sleazy smear from start to finish.
Actually, the start is not so bad. The first quote is a simple description of what is happening from Yahoo news. Her second quotation comes from a regional newspaper, and she is pretty selective. It starts:
Wildfires thrive in hot, dry weather. But the conditions also contribute to the die-off of trees, which must compete for water in forests that have become unnaturally dense because of a century of misguided fire suppression. Once dead and brittle, the trees become more fuel for catastrophic fires.
She ignored the two sentences immediately before those sentences:
The increased severity and length of fires seasons comes as the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change reports a clear pattern of temperatures nationwide. The hotter weather is coupled with predictions of decreased precipitation in the Southwest..
Another sentence in the same short article she forgot to quote:
The nation's worsening fire seasons are, in part, a consequence of global warming and are likely to get more severe unless forest managers step up tree removal efforts and prescribed fire programs, a group of scientists testified Monday before a congressional panel.
For her money quote, the one she uses to "prove" that the fires are the fault of environmentalists, she goes to a thoroughly corrupt source for an article it published more than four years ago. The quote comes from the Heartland Institute, a foundation financed in large part by tobacco, oil and auto interests. Not surprisingly, the "scientists" of the institute consider Al Gore and Global Warming fraudulent. Their favorite "environmental scientist" is of course funded by Exxon. The institute also promotes school choice, "free market health care," and defends smoking. They assert that:
The public health community's campaign to demonize smokers and all forms of tobacco is based on junk science.
Junk sources are what Malkin relies on for her posts.
(More from memeorandum)
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