A War Correspondence

In their Saturday coverage of the Black Crater Fire, the Albany Democrat Herald reported this snappish exchange:

Gov. Ted Kulongoski said he planned to take an aerial tour of the fire today, while his Republican challenger, Ron Saxton, also planned to make a tour.

Through their campaign spokesmen, Kulongoski and Saxton sparred over forest management, with Saxton putting on a radio ad claiming that Kulongoski does not support legislation in Congress to allow removal of dead and dying trees.

“Oregon’s forests are being mismanaged and neglected, and this puts entire communities in danger,’’ Saxton said in a statement accompanying the release of the radio ad.

Jim Ross, a Kulongoski campaign spokesman, dismissed the ad and the claim as factually incorrect.

Ross said the governor has been working with the Northwest congressional delegation to fully fund the Healthy Forest Restoration Act since it was approved in 2003.

“Ron Saxton is playing politics with people’s lives and property, and he got his facts wrong too,’’ Ross said.

If the dead tree pulp media can be trusted (ha ha), then the governor’s mouthpiece is a flaming liar. Teddy the Torch has never supported healthy forests, or the Healthy Forests Restoration Act, nor has he ever worked “with the Northwest congressional delegation to fully fund” the HFRA.

Teddy the Torch ran, and was elected, behind his campaign slogan of “Healthy Forests Stink” (see here). The central theme of TT’s stated forest policies was, and has been ever since, No Touch, Let It Burn, Watch It Rot. The Torch presented his theme to the Portland City Club (and to the rest of Oregon via radio and TV) in August of 2002 while the largest fire in Oregon history, the Biscuit Fire, was raging across a half million acres.

Teddy the Torch has never helped to get funding for the HFRA. The HFRA is fully funded and always has been. Just the opposite, TT has fought that funding in solidarity with the Oregon Delegation (with the exception of Greg Walden, who wrote the HFRA).

Teddy the Torch and his Democrat cohorts in the Oregon Congressional Delegation (all but Walden) speechified and voted against the HFRA every chance they got. Senator Ron Ah Ah Ah Ah Ah Wyden even filibustered the HFRA (unsuccessfully). As a result of their continuing opposition, there have been no HFRA projects in Oregon, other than in Walden’s district.

Teddy the Torch and his Communist Party cohorts have even lent their support to lawsuits aimed at halting funded projects and crippling the HFRA nationwide.

Teddy the Torch and his eco-Nazi cohorts have consistently supported, from the beginning, to this day, and into the unforeseeable future, the Northwest Forest Plan. That excretious (excretory?) mating of fascist politics and fraudulent “science” has destroyed millions of acres of forest, driven spotted owls further towards extinction, and hobbled the economy of rural Oregon for fifteen years.

Forest health, TT? More like forest annihilation on a regional scale.

Teddy the Torch and his Neanderthal Party cohorts have done all this for purely partisan political reasons, not out of any rational or responsible concern for anything other than themselves. TT doesn’t give a hoot about forests, except insofar as he is hellbent on burning Oregon to the ground, and our forests are handy fuel.

We have always given Teddy the Torch credit for frankness; he has never hidden his arsonist agenda (until now). His Burn Out Rural Oregon campaign in 2002 was a huge success. Granted, he lost in every rural county in the state, but the whopping two-thirds majority of the votes he stuffed in Portland easily gave Teddy the Torch the goober-natorial victory.

Portlanders voted overwhelming for Teddy the Torch principally because of his Punish Rural Oregon, Destroy Oregon’s Forests campaign theme. Portlanders hate rural Oregonians, too, and would like nothing better than to cleanse the rest of the state of its filthy humanity, even if it takes wholesale holocaust to the job.

We are therefore quite surprised to read that TT’s spokesmodel spouted the utter falsehoods he spouted. Portland is still where the votes are. Has Portland changed? Do the voters in Portland no longer wish to lock up, incinerate, and convert to tick brush Oregon’s priceless, heritage forests?

Why not? What has changed in Arson Town? Did they discontinue the stupid-inducing drugs they used to put in Portland’s drinking water? We find that hard to believe. It’s almost as hard to believe as Teddy the Torch’s latest ravings.

Lest you think we support TT’s opponent, quasi-Republican Ron Saxton, think again. Metro Ron is another Portland lawyer, just like Teddy the Torch. Saxton knows (and cares) absolutely jack about forests or rural Oregonians. Metro Ron and Teddy the Torch are two sides of the same bent coin.

We do not support either candidate. Hence, after the election, we will lament for a short while, and then struggle against whichever mendacious urban doofus is elected. Like always.

It’s a war, really. War is, by definition, the takeover of territory by force, usually (not always) by an armed militia, and often with the mass eviction (or slaughter) of the previous residents, and laying waste to the land.

War is what is happening here. Federal and state governments are waging war on the residents of the rural American West. The fearsome fires are a scorched earth battle tactic perpetrated by design, and only one of many weapons in the aggressor’s arsenal.

Another eco-Nazi weapon, for instance, is the stocking of the rural West with wolves, the one land predator unafraid of man.

It is an ancient, recurring war, more than 500 years old. And it is hurtful, and as destructive as hell, like any war, and unhealthy for children and other living things, such as forests.

Teddy the Torch is no friend of rural Oregon. He is and always has been a sworn enemy.