As the California wildfires continued to consume large swaths of land, destroy homes, gut businesses, and take lives, a Democratic Congresswoman from the state went on television and offered up a galaxy-brain scapegoat. Maxine Waters once famously urged her supporters to angrily confront Trump administration officials out in public. She instructed them to “create a crowd” to “push back” in order to send a message that such people are “not welcome anymore, anywhere.” Mob tactics. Fast forward to recent days, and she’s taken to reciting a stale, partisan, irrelevant talking point as her party’s leadership failures in her home state have grown increasingly undeniable. After saying she doesn’t want to assign blame earlier in the interview, she immediately started blaming…wealthy people for not paying their “fair taxes” because “services cost money:”
Unbelievable. Californians, especially in the bluest parts of a deep blue state, pay through the nose in taxes, financing some of the most expensive government operations anywhere in the world, and certainly the country. Rich people have been demonized and soaked by politicians for many years, under one-party rule, driving many people to flee the oppressive tax and regulatory environment. Republicans are powerless at the state level, and have been for quite some time. The notion that the failed wildfire response is a product of insufficiently high taxation on rich people, in a place that is entirely dominated by tax-and-spend zealots, is ludicrous. But that’s Waters’ take-away, which is emblematic of the problem. Far too many of her ideological ilk literally cannot govern competently. They crave and seek power, as if power if the ultimate end. But when it’s time for them to use the power in order to achieve basic functions of government in crisis situations, they’re stumped. This goes to an important point about their deployment of another go-to political talking point: