There's probably something that can't be blamed on the Bush regime's slash-and-burn philosophy of governing, but inadequate fire preparedness isn't it

Howie has already called attention below to Michael Roston's Huffpost report citing the recent GAO report on inadequate government preparation for this and future fire seasons.

No, the ideological sociopaths and profiteering thugs of the regime didn't cause the Southern California fires, any more than they caused Hurricane Katrina. What they did was make sure that governmental resources were sufficiently mismanaged, with the usual heavy doses of politicizing and privatizing, to set the stage for catastrophe.

We could probably all have written the outlines of this story, but Michael has filled in the blanks:

In a June report, the GAO report faulted the U.S. Forest Service, Department of Agriculture, and other agencies for failing to accomplish the "fundamental step" of planning out what assets and resources were needed to prepare for approaching fire seasons. Meanwhile, disaster response problems that have become all too familiar in recent years were also identified: administration officials placing resources where they were politically expedient, and using poorly performing contractors to accomplish critical national tasks.

"If you don't have goals and strategies for carrying them out, you're in a reactive mode rather than a proactive mode," Robin Nazarro, director of GAO's Natural Resources and Environment program and lead author of the report, told HuffPost. "They say they are using 5 to 10 year averages, but each year the fires gets worse, so they're always underestimating what they need."

You should read the whole report, but it's creepily more of the same old same old. Incompetent don't-give-a-damn planning, with large-scale siphoning off of tax dollars to "national contractors" who one supposes will turn out to be another set of the usual disaster-profiteering regime cronies.

I don't even recall which of the Bush-regime-inspired catastrophes Paul Krugman was commenting on last week on Countdown when Keith Olbermann pressed him for some glimmering of why, and he noted that the right-wing loonies--uh, my phrase, not his--just go crazy over any suggestion that people have any responsibility to help one another. It just drives them nuts. And no one has argued more persuasively than Krugman that one of the central missions of this administration has been to prove that government is truly incompetent to deal with problems, even (or especially) problems that have been attacked with success in the past by honest and competent government officials. (Remember the Clinton-era FEMA that was widely admired for its commitment to emergency preparedness?)

Couple this fundamental underlying psychosis with that other great philosophical underpinning of modern "conservative" government--that government exists for the purpose of helping its friends, cronies, and cash contributors steal every dollar that isn't nailed down--and you've got, well, the same old same old.