Idaho Skies, Smoke, and Lies

The West is thick with smoke. And I swear a lot of it comes from our governor. That is to say, Brad Little is blowing smoke up our skirts about everything.

This month, his smoke show involves actual fires. 

We are well into a destructive fire season. This surprises no fact-driven, community-loving leaders because fire experts and climate scientists warned us this winter that hot dry weather was headed our way. Of course, Mr. Little ignored them and listened to his wealthy handlers instead. 

Honestly, I suspect Mr. Little has gone deaf in the ear that points toward anyone who hates watching Idaho’s wild beauty and prosperity go up in smoke.

Remember earlier this year when ruthless Republicans rallied to Little’s call to slash everything? At one point, Brad Little even considered cutting the number of the state’s wildland firefighters!

So, with all this nasty smoke choking our kids and elders, Mr. Little has decided to brag about how good we have it. A week ago, he crowed about how proud he is of the state’s finances. At the same time, Mr. Little reported that the Idaho Department of Lands is running with ZERO DOLLARS in its budget. 

That’s worth repeating: The agency that fights wildfires has ZERO DOLLARS in its budget at the beginning of a horrific fire season that everyone saw coming. 

Little actually said this: “Wildfire is reality in life in the West. We cannot eliminate the threat, but we can be ready for it.”

Mr Little! That’s exactly what you didn’t do! You didn’t budget to protect our lives and property. Instead, you kept a ton of tax gifts flowing to your fat cat donors by protecting your $450 million billionaire tax cut.

Don’t let him fool you, folks. Mr. Little is full-on gaslighting us. 

Gaslighting, by the way, is the perfect word for it. It comes from a 1938 British play, “Gas Light,” where a husband tries to convince his wife she is insane by secretly dimming their house’s gas lamps and hiding objects from her – all the while telling her she’s imagining things.

During explosive fire weather, “gaslighting” serves the dual meaning for a state leader who plays with actual fire. 

The National Interagency Fire Center reported there were more fires nationally last year  – 77,850 – than any of the previous 10 years. That was 27,000 more fires than in 2019. Idaho’s share of that was 1,300 wildland fires (784 caused by humans) that burned 181,000 acres.

These statistics are all public at https://www.nifc.gov/fire-information/statistics. 

In other words, these statistics were never secret; neither was the weird western winter that brought rain instead of snowpack.

Little and his cronies literally just needed to step outside the Capitol to know that something was unusual. They’d have noticed the second-warmest winter since 1934. Snow didn’t stick. Vegetation grew fast and then quickly dried up. Folks who fight fire warned Mr. Little.

That smoke overhead represents hundreds of millions of dollars in property, and the lives of people, livestock, and wildlife–all burned away. We are not prepared for it. And we should have been.

And right now our governor wants you to think you’re crazy for worrying about it.