9/14/20: President Trump headed for
California on Monday to raise money for his campaign. With the state in crisis,
he stopped to talk to California leaders in one of his most useless meetings ever.
There to offer solace for a state on
fire, he smirked.
Challenged by a fire official to face up to the fact that climate change had made the situation more dire, and that the science was clear, the president responded, “It will start getting cooler. Just watch.”
“I don’t think science knows, actually,” he added.
Trump had previously blamed the wildfires on poor forest management by Democrats who run the state. At one point he told his underlings that he wasn’t going to give the people whose homes had burned down federal disaster aid, because they hadn’t voted for him. Now Gov. Gavin Newsom pointed out that 57% of the land in his state was federally-owned forest.
So, you might say: Trump had the burden on his shoulders, and it would be nice if he did his part.
“The only thing that stops a bad guy with a ballot…”
If you
don’t follow environmental issues closely, you may not realize how terrible Donald
J. Denier has been in regard to climate change, or even protecting clean air
and water. In another clear sign of the growing danger – not counting the
fact a good chunk of the United States is in flames – and more named
hurricanes have formed already this year than in any year since record keeping began in 1851 – 170 environmental
organizations have united to warn their members. Do not to vote for the Green Party in November. Do not sit out
the election and pout, just because Joe Biden’s policies might not go as far as
you want. Fifty years of advocacy for cleaner air and water, and the health of
the planet, have taught these organizations hard truths.
The bitter
lesson of 2016 cannot be repeated – when enough “green” votes in several key states went to a third
party candidate and allowed Trump to clinch his wide-bottom seat in the Oval
Office.
Leaders of
the group write in a joint letter:
Elections matter most in the
end. The only thing that stops a bad guy with a ballot is a good guy with a
ballot, and this year, our ballots will be cast for Joe Biden and Kamala
Harris.
Many of us have voted for
third-party candidates in other elections, convinced that a party called
“Green” was the only principled choice. Not this year. This year the only
meaningful green votes will be cast for the single candidate who can end
Trump’s disastrous presidency [emphasis added]. Only by rallying behind the
Democratic Party can we end the Trump administration’s unprecedented
malignancy, fear mongering, pathological lying, and atrocious policy making.
This is not the year to…waste a single vote.
They
present two starkly different options:
Sure, [Biden] isn’t perfect.
Which of us is? But in the 2020 election, the most crucial since 1864, we have
only two meaningful options: we can make a lifetime humanitarian our president,
backed by a able cabinet and a progressive Congress; or expand the strongman
rule of Donald Trump, who desecrates his office every day, spreads racism and a
fatal virus for political gain, ignores environmental justice, embraces the
fossil fuel industry, and calls the climate crisis a hoax.
Every generation is
accountable for its leaders, and we are accountable for Trump. We can beat him
and his congressional enablers at the polls or help him stay in power by wasting
our votes or staying home, and tell children not yet born we were too pure
to vote for Democrats.
All we have to lose are our
country and the planet.
*
QUOTING Joe Biden, who recently labeled Trump a “climate arsonist,” would be too easy. Biden was right, but it may sway a few people if we pay attention to warnings within the Republican Party. Christine Todd Whitman, former governor of New Jersey, is backing Biden, in large part because of the president’s retrograde environmental policies.
“It’s mind-boggling, the ignorance that he displays on this subject,” Ms. Whitman said in an interview this week. “He doesn’t understand climate change. He doesn’t particularly believe in science. It’s all about him and his re-election.”
“He doesn’t govern for all Americans.”
Worse, he doesn’t govern for future generations. If he wins a second term, that’s as far as his thinking extends.
You can see many of the massive western fires from outer space.
 |
Bootleg Fire in Oregon, seen from space. |
*
“Everything
about it, was fucking appalling.”
In other news, Tim Miller, former spokesman for the Republican
National Committee, lets rip after watching Trump conduct a campaign rally in Henderson, Nevada. Bad enough, in
these days of mass coronavirus spread, that he joked about his followers
crowding together and howling in anger. “The spittle was flying,” Miller said.
“So were the lies.” He called the whole affair “a public-health monstrosity.”
He went on to describe the president’s appearance as “a shocking and unimaginably wheels-off undertaking given that it came
amid a pandemic that is still killing a thousand Americans a day and with
wildfires making much of the West Coast uninhabitable.”
Miller went on to list the various lies of
President Trump – including at least one new one, that when he took over grass
was growing on the “runways” used by NASA. But let’s just sum it all up.
“Everything about it,”
Mr. Miller said of the rally, “was fucking appalling.”
In fact it was so appalling that
it would stand out as the single most appalling and reckless political event
hosted by any presidential nominee in my lifetime before yesterday by a long
shot, if you just didn’t count anything else that Donald Trump did.
And that’s the problem.
Somewhere along the way he removed many people’s ability to be appalled.
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