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Thick smoke in Chicago last week.
MAGA has been embarrassingly
whining about the smoke without
offering any real help or
solutions to the problem. |
Just stop already.
MAGA is going nuts over the wildfire smoke billowing into theUnited States from Canada, and it has long since become embarrassing.
Somehow, MAGA thinks Canada can wave a magic wand to stop the fires, or, they're sending the smoke over the border as some sort of deliberate provocation.
Sigh.
MAGA has spent the past week falling over each attacking Canada for the fires, as if they aren't battling the blazes with everything they have and praying for soaking, widespread rains.
We have so many, sad disgusting examples. Let's go through a bunch of them, just to wallow in the stupidity. :
Republican Sen. Bernie Moreno, R-Ohio said he is introducing legislation that would require an investigation as to whether the Canadian smoke had harmed U.S. air quality and to sanctions those responsible. Moreno ought to be careful, given the harm the United States has caused Canada.
Moreno's legislation gets worse.
As Daily Beast reports, "The bill reportedly goes so far as to threaten to revoke the visas of those deemed responsible for the 'atrocity.' The legislation also 'expresses a sense' that the Canadian ambassador should be declared persona non grata until the smoke no longer affects the U.S."
Moreno's legislation would ban U.S. government contracts with Canada and Export-Import Bank assistance and authorize the president to most import restrictions.
Katie Miller, the wife of the odious White House aide Stephen Miller, posted the wild idea that annexing Canada would have spared the U.S. of the wildfire smoke. "This is why Canada should be the 51st state," she wrote.
Rep. Lisa McClain, Michigan, had this temper tantrum on the social media platform X, formerly Twitter: "Michiganders shouldn't have to breathe negligence....."YEAR AFTER YEAR the smoke crossed the border while Canada does nothing. Stop exporting your smoke into our skies. Enough is enough!"
Does she expect Canada to erect a wall to block the smoke?
Also on X, Rep. Nick Langworthy, R-NY, whined, "This is no longer a one-time emergency - it's becoming an annual public health crisis. This is unacceptable."
It's not just MAGA Republicans. I found a Democrat who entered the fray. Michigan State Rep. Alabas Farhat posted on Threads:
"For four straight years, Canada has failed to get these fires under control, and Michigan continues to pay the price."
He referred the fires as "Canada forest management failures." He also said if Canada "refuses" to stop the fires (as if!) he said "There should be consequences."
This motive for all this whining? Almost all of it is in service to the Orange Lump of a president. We remember all the anti-Canada blather Trump has belched, the demands to make Canada the 51st state. And, after a couple days of all this, on Friday, all this stupidly and predictable whining culminated with Donald Trump saying he would add to the tariffs he's already imposed on Canada.
The Orange Lump said Canada "has refused to engage in basic Forest Management and Debris Removal." I guess Canada was supposed to rake its forests, just as he insisted California should have done.
Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney had a devastatingly low key reaction to the MAGA tantrums: "Climate change is everyone's responsibility, truly everyone's including the United States."
ABOUT THAT CLIMATE CHANGE
There have always been occasional years with Canadian or western United States fires that belch smoke into the United States. It used to be infrequent.
On May 19, 1790 - way back when - was labeled the "Famous Dark Day" in New England, according to the Vermont Weather Book. Candles were needed to read, and the air had an eerie, brassy hue. That was probably smoke from the western United States or maybe the northern Great Lakes region.
On September 6, 1881, it was the legendary, "Yellow Day," Everything took on a yellow hue, and artificial light was needed to read documents and books during the day. Basically the same thing happened in September, 1908, and September 1950.
So we used to have smoky days, but since those days were a rarity, they became legend.
Now however, smoke attacks are no longer a rarity, but a regular occurrence. So what changed?
Canada has roughly 1.4 million square miles of forest. Most of it is boreal forest, a broad area representing 30 percent of the global forest area in northern areas of Canada, Russia and Alaska.
Most of the forests are remote, and impossible to manage like forests in more populated areas in the continental United States.
Fires have gotten worse and widespread in recent years for reasons that mostly have to do with climate change. The snow in the spring melts sooner than it once did, leaving more time for the landscape two dry out than it once did Parts of Canada are warming at twice the rate of the global average, creating heat waves that further dry things out.
The summer heat also destabilizes the air, creating thunderstorms with relatively little rain but plenty of lightning strikes that set off fires. Invasive bark beetles kills swaths of foresters, leaving behind tinder dry dead trees.
So, contrary to MAGA, Canada isn't trying to torture Americans by sending choking wildfire smoke into the United States. They are in large part a victim of climate change. And historically, the United States has always been the #1 or #2 greenhouse gas emitters in the world.
In the end, climate change has us breathing smoke that makes us sick, and will end up killing some of us.
MAGA has been yelling outrageous things about the wildfire smoke. But just hint to them climate change might have had something to do with it, the screaming just becomes that much louder.
THE FIRES
On Saturday, 949 fires were burning across Canada, according to the Canadian Wildland Fire Information System. The intense fires in Ontario were quieter, thanks to some rain.
But those weren't the only fires burning in North America. As of Saturday, there were 73 large fires burning across the United States, including 17 new large incidents, according to the National Interagency Fire Center. Most of these were in the West and in northern Minnesota. There were also a multitude of smaller fires burning around the nation.
Fires are also burning in the boreal forests of Siberia. In recent days, a fire in Norway spread from a townhouse and into a forest, where it continued on to destroy about 100 homes. It was the largest such fire in Norway's history.
TRAGEDY, HELP AND HONOR
It's not as if Canada is just gleefully sending smoke to the U.S. Smoke has choked much of southern Canada, including large cities like Toronto, Ottawa and Montreal.
The Canadian fires have especially hit the First Nations communities in Ontario. Thousands were evacuated. An unknown number of houses have burned, but the number of destroyed buildings is easily in the hundreds.
Normally, and in the past, the United States and Canada would help each other with emergencies. Canada is still doing that.
Sometimes, firefighters give their lives to the effort. About a week ago, Nicholas Dale, 56 of Sooke, British Columbia died in a helicopter crash while responding to a wildfire in not too far north of Telluride.
Dale's death make the vitriol aimed at Canada over the smoky atmosphere especially galling.
In a demonstration of how much more decent most Americans are, compared to the noxious MAGA crowd, Wyoming Public Radio described this scene as the sad process of returning Dale's body to Canada began. :
"On Monday morning, a line of firetrucks, ambulances and other emergency response vehicles flashing their lights stretched for nearly a mile as the convoy passed through the little towns and small cities between Gunnison and Grand Junction.
In Montrose, hundreds somberly lined U.S. Highway 509 holding American flags to honor Dale."
STUPIDITY WORSENS
Meanwhile, he whining from MAGA kept getting louder and even more bizarre gets even worse in some circles
Right Wing Watch posted on X (formerly Twitter) posted this gem of a clip from MAGA activist Eric Metaxas:
"Who's telling me how to live my life? I'm an adult man in a free country, and you're telling me, 'limit your outdoor activity.'' he said, "How dare they say that. Who has the right to tell me or you or anyone anything? It's a free country. I can do whatever I want."
Never mind this was just an advisory, kind of like telling people to drive carefully in a winter storm. But the guy isn't very bright. The comments section was glorious
"He should definitely go outside ad jog for HOURS!
"Fine, Eric. Please go outside and put your mouth over a diesel bus exhaust. It will benefit all of us."
"Eric doesn't understand the difference between a suggestion and an order Poor guy."
"Oh the humanity! This dude is the victim of receiving information! Will the abusive alerts never stop enslaving him?"
"Getting asthma to own the libs."
"Dear Eric - I forbid you from running out in front of traffic on the expressway."
Metaxas is a great example of the low, ignorant, tragicomic MAGA mentality. They can do anything! They are all powerful! While the rest of us roll our eyes and laugh at them.
MAGA seems to think the abuse they've hurled at Canada is a flex, showing how powerful they are. Trump and his minions are actually demonstrating exactly how weak they are. Their pathetic insults and whining is a precise demonstration of how impotent MAGA really is.
We should all remember that despite their bluster, the rest of us hold most of the power. We ought to use it.
