An Ignorant Denver Post Editorial

The Denver Post published an amazingly ignorant editorial today that it called "With Friends Like These, The West Doesn't Need Enemies."

The bark beetle tree kill in Colorado has been historic in magnitude. With all this tinder lying around on federal land, you might think the government would be redoubling efforts to haul out dead trees, make the forests healthy and support fire management activities.

Unfortunately, that's not the reality reflected in President Bush's budget request for 2009.

His budget actually cuts funding by 11.2 percent for the region of the Forest Service that includes Colorado, Wyoming, South Dakota, Nebraska and Kansas.

To hear the Denver Post tell it, this is all President Bush's fault. It conveniently leaves out the fact that President Bush or his successor could direct the entire Federal budget toward getting rid of the dead trees and not a single tree would be removed.

Why? The Sierra Club, the Wilderness Society, and their congressional toadies like Mark Udall, Ken Salazar, and John Salazar have laws in place which prevent the building of forest roads necessary to do the work.

If the Denver Post did a Lexus-Nexus search, it would discover that the victims who lost their homes in last summer's Lake Tahoe fire were blaming the Sierra Club for going to court to stop the construction of forest roads. The roads were needed for the thinning that would have saved their homes and at least one life. The problem wasn't a lack of Federal funding. It was a lack of common sense by the Mark Udall's of the congress.

Mark Udall not only doesn't want new roads to be built, he wants existing roads closed. In 2007 he proposed an amendment to do just that.

Yes, the west has friends that it can do without. Ken Salazar, Mark Udall, and John Salazar along with their eco terrorist sponsors in the Sierra Club and the Wilderness Society are much higher on that list than President Bush or his successor, Republican or Democrat ever can be.

Wake up, Denver Post, and put some pressure on these turkeys. Your editorial was a cheap shot that gives the real culprits a free pass. It was pure ignorance.

The First Rule of Politics

Mark Udall demonstrated that he fully understands the first rule of politics: If you are going to lie, make it a whopper.

"We are in the midst of a very dramatic beetle-kill cycle in our lodgepole forests," he said.

Mother nature holds the upper hand, he said, but we must do everything we can to mitigate the impacts. Udall said several years ago he encouraged the Federal Emergency Management Agency to consider disaster mitigation for communities like Winter Park that are facing lots of beetle-kill.

He said, "FEMA's response was not much better for us than New Orleans."

Mark Udall is only this year sponsoring a bill to reverse the laws he helped put in place to restrict thinning, and then only within a mile of these communities. Neither FEMA nor the Forest Service can overcome the laws that the environmentalist extremists put in place to restrict thinning, and to claim that their "response was not much better...than New Orleans" ignores that fact in an act of pure hypocrisy.

The story got buried quickly, but last month the Lake Tahoe fire victims were publicly blaming the Sierra Club for going to court to slow the thinning and road building that would have saved their homes.

Just this year, Udall put up an amendment that would have closed roads on Federal lands to the public.

Mark Udall is acting like a little kid who has spent his lifetime strewing nails on the street leading to his home and now angrily blames the fire department for not responding quickly enough when he set his own house afire.

The Costs of Roadless Wilderness

The Colorado Index is suggesting that Boulder Liberal Mark Udall is creating the potential for ever larger forest fires by closing the roads. The author observes that closing the roads makes it difficult or impossible to thin forests and notes that the Lake Tahoe residents who were burned out are complaining about the Sierra Club's interference in the thinning process.

Closing the roads also might cause the deaths of fire fighters and a huge infestation of beetles with the potential to kill hundreds of thousands of acres of forest.

The essays are here, here, here, and here.