Like Wildfire

Not surprisingly, when a bogus CNN.com page appeared announcing that MEChA terrorists had claimed responsibility for setting the fires, more than a few posters were quite willing to accept the gag at face value — especially since the prank, which had been grafted onto a real CNN dispatch, cautioned that “No suspects have been identified, though they are probably brown.”

IF KATRINA WAS George W. Bush’s Vietnam, then the wildfires are his Desert Storm — an opportunity to redeem his can-do credentials and rewrite the history of the New Orleans debacle. There was no shortage of media accomplices to help him carry out this sleight of hand. Even FEMA pitched in this week by staging a fake press conference at which the agency’s staffers posed as reporters to ask FEMA deputy administrator Harvey E. Johnson Jr. softball, Hallmarky questions about the agency’s gallant service out on the coast.

Our own Republican governor also basked in the glow, as it were, of the incendiary event. The mantra from Arnold Schwarzenegger and the Republican half of Punditstan was, “All the firemen, trucks and super scoopers that have been on Christmas layaway since the 2003 Cedar Fire couldn’t have stopped this awesome outburst of nature.”

This self-satisfying refrain was challenged by Orange County fire Chief Chip Prather, who claimed that, in the case of the Santiago Fire, at least, “It is an absolute fact, had we had more air resources, we would have been able to control this fire.” The governor became apoplectic — not only had he been contradicted, but Prather’s J’accuse shone a revealing blacklight on the right’s don’t-tax-me philosophy and its utterly mendacious myth of self-reliance.

None of this is to say that the rumor mill wasn’t cranked by the left too. (Or rather, the traditional center that Fox News and others have successfully rebranded as the left.) Liberal claims that the fires might have been extinguished much sooner if only the state’s National Guardsmen weren’t in Iraq have a slightly disingenuous ring to them, along with the sinister observations about how quickly Bush visited Republican San Diego County and not Democratic Los Angeles (ignoring the scale of loss in the two counties). What is clear, though, is that the level of political debate, such as it exists, is so thoroughly polarized that even natural calamities will set off the rawest civic emotions. And that, behind the photo poses of the Bushes and Schwarzeneggers, seethe many Americans who feel threatened by forces far scarier than wildfires.