I heard about 15 minutes of Rush Limbaugh this morning and all he was doing was rambling on about the fires and how it’s all the environmentalists’ fault. He doesn’t just call us environmentalists, he calls us environmental wackos. To write this column I looked up what he’d put on his web site about the fires today, and he used the word "wackos" six times. And "wacko" once, in the headline. Hasn’t Rush noticed that "wackos" gets the red squiggle from MSWord? Maybe he should start using real words if he wants to make a point.

The gist of his tirade is that all forest fires are the result of environmentalists trying to save the forests. The argument goes that because we won’t let them chop down every tree in America, trees still exist and some of them catch on fire; chop down all the trees, and voila! no more forest fires! He actually said "You have to take away the fuel that feeds the fire." I heard that on the radio and it’s there in print on his web site.

I’ve heard this before. The same "scientific facts" are spouted on a regular basis by a local talk show host in San Francisco named Bill Wattenberg. He also thinks we should chop down trees to save forests. Isn’t there an idiom about that? Idiot is more like it.

In his web article, Rush went on to say that a caller had described "how the people [in Arizona] are reacting to the environmentalists and the so-called forest management plans—with chain saws." Yeah, that’s good. We don’t want trees to burn down because then we’ll have no trees. So cut them down instead. What difference will that make? What we need is law enforcement personnel doing their job, and arresting these people using chain saws…they just pollute the environment even more.

The second-to-last paragraph in this column on Rush’s web site said—I copied and pasted so there’s no chance of misquoting him:

How’s that for documentation? "A lot" of callers weighed in, and he names two. One points out "the irony of it all" but no one explains what’s ironic about it. We just have to take his word for it. The other had "an interesting observation concerning drilling in ANWR," but Rush doesn’t tell us what that observation was. We just have to take his word for it that it’s interesting—and we have to take his word for it that it illustrates the hypocrisy of the wackos.

Rush says "what this all boils down to, is exposing the environmental wackos for who they really are: anti-capitalist socialists." But all his column does is expose conservatives for who they really are: Mean-spirited, hate-speaking, nature-destroying jerks who blame environmentalists just because George Bush can’t keep forests from burning down. And how smart are you if you think the best way to prevent a tree from burning is to chop it down?

He also calls environmentalists "militant wackos who place trees ahead of human beings." No we don’t. But maybe we should.

He concludes, "They have an agenda, which becomes clearer as each tree is burnt to the ground." I don’t know what he means by that, but just to get back to "You have to take away the fuel that feeds the fire" for a minute: that’s exactly what we environmentalists are trying to do. Rush just doesn’t realize that there’s a way to deprive the fire of the fuel WITHOUT chopping down every tree in America. Oxygen is one of the fuels that feeds fire too, and if they’d just let enough trees grow in the forest, then the vegetation would get thick enough to take up all the room so there’d be no more oxygen left, and the fires couldn’t spread at all! But first, you have to let lots of trees grow, so stop cutting them down!