Wildfires

Mister George W. "Geniusweed" Bush appears on the verge of having a potentially disastrous second front open in his Oedipal Iraq War:

Turkey said on Monday it would exhaust diplomatic channels before launching any military strike into northern Iraq to root out Kurdish rebels, who killed at least a dozen Turkish soldiers in fighting over the weekend.

Turkey has built up its forces along the border with Iraq in preparation for an incursion against rebel bases, although Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan has pressed Iraq to curb the Kurdish separatists first.

"If expected developments do not take place in the next few days, we will have to take care of our own situation," Erdogan said Monday.

Heckuva job, Bush-ay!

Wait, did I say second front? There's a third opening up as well, also with help from those feisty Kurds:

Yet out of the public eye, a chillingly similar battle has been under way on the Iraqi border with Iran. Kurdish guerrillas ambush and kill Iranian forces and retreat to their hide-outs in Iraq. The Americans offer Iran little sympathy. Tehran even says Washington aids the Iranian guerrillas, a charge the United States denies. True or not, that conflict, like the Turkish one, has explosive potential.

Those darn Iranians. I'll bet they never tried to make nice. Or did they:

Toward the end of a great column on Iran, Fareed Zakaria's references the convenient truth about Iranian senior policymakers -- they want improved relations with the United States, citing the story of James Dobbins, the only person who's ever been actually sent to try to cooperate with Iran: "Dobbins says the Iranians made overtures to have better relations with the United States through him and others in 2001 and later, but got no reply. Even after the Axis of Evil speech, he recalls, they offered to cooperate in Afghanistan. Dobbins took the proposal to a principals meeting in Washington only to have it met with dead silence."

So what does Bushie want? As always, more money:

President Bush asked Congress on Monday to approve $196 billion to pay for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and other national security programs, setting the stage for a new confrontation with Democrats over the administration’s handling of Iraq.

Rest easy. We all know what those Dems will do...

So while Bush sets wildfires in the Middle East that could all to conceivably lead to WWIII, there's another set of fires decimating the most Western part of our United States:

An epic wave of fast-moving wildfires engulfed a massive swath of southern California on Monday, destroying hundreds of homes as more than 250,000 people were told to evacuate from neighborhoods, schools and hospitals.

At least 13 fires, whipped by dry, gale-force Santa Ana winds blowing unchecked over the lower half of the state, torching 200,000 acres, killing one person and injuring more than 30 others.

With fire crews and state emergency services overwhelmed, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger said 1,500 National Guard troops had been summoned, including 200 from the Mexican border, to help with firefighting, evacuations and crowd control.

Hey, aren't those National Guardsmen supposed to be workin' on the fence between the U.S. and Mexico? This does not compute!

Especially as rightwing mouthpiece Glenn Beck, inexplicably still on CNN, is saying that we Californians deserve it:

"I think there is a handful of people who hate America. Unfortunately for them, a lot of them are losing their homes in a forest fire today."

I actually have a two word answer for Mr. Beck, but I'll leave it to your imagination. Let's just say that Mr. Beck is clearly NOT a patriot as he maligns a very significant chunk of our great nation and basically consigns them to death. Let's just say that my two word answer start with "f" and ends with "you."

Lovely.