How about these fires out in Southern California — Malibu? This is just, well, it’s amazing, but it’s not uncommon. I actually think these fires are worse than hurricanes. I wonder where in the world are the environmentalist wackos here trying to put the fires out? This has been an amazing thing to watch and to read about. I imagine if you were sitting in Southern California on Sunday, the experience of watching these fires and the media reaction was fascinating. But one thing stood out to me, especially in Malibu, when you watch the wall-to-wall coverage, you see firemen, you see homeowners, you see landlords, you see business owners all struggling to save their homes and their businesses, and when the fire department wasn’t able to help, they used garden hoses to fight the flames. They got 60 plus-mile-an-hour winds out there, the Santa Anas are driving all this. People are stamping out flames with their tennis shoes; their tennis shoes are catching fire.
Guys are trying to keep flames from coming underneath the door in their garages and so forth. And the people that were noticeably absent were the environmentalist wackos. Where were Greenpeace, Sierra Club and where were their bucket brigades, where do these people show up in time of disaster like this? They just love the wilderness, don’t they? It’s what they always say, ‘Save the species. Save the earth.’ Well, Mother Nature turned a whole bunch of Southern California via a torch, and I didn’t see one Algore acolyte out there trying to help out. I’m sitting there watching this and I wonder how much CO2 and particulate matter got belched into the atmosphere from one fire, let alone five different fires out there. Talk about carbon footprint, try charcoal footprint. Well, it’s natural, but here’s the thing about Southern California. The left is going to claim, and a lot of people are going to claim, this is caused by a drought. Now, I lived up in California up in the northern part. I lived in Sacramento for a while before I moved to New York. I would go to LA for business reasons. There were always signs in the hotel, ‘Use as little water as necessary.’
There’s always a drought out there because it’s a desert. It is not naturally green. I don’t want to offend anybody out there, but the natural inclination would be when we’re out there discovering the country, ‘Don’t put a city here,’ but they funnel water in from the northern part of the state. There’s always a big battle over that, too, and other western states where the water comes in. But it’s basically a desert. It’s basically a desert with a great view. It’s not naturally green. You look at some of the vegetation, chaparral, for example, that’s a real water-loving species. Pretty soon they’re going to put cactus out there, just to have something to put fires out with. It’s just an amazing thing to watch, you feel for everybody impacted by this. But fires happen. They happen regularly. These fires are an annual thing. This one is considered to be a little worse because of where it’s hitting. It’s hitting Malibu, which is an upper-crust, elitist enclave. So the class envy crowd ought to be somewhat happy with this. All the way up from San Diego, Santa Barbara is right between a couple of fires now.
As I say, we live in a hurricane-prone area here in south Florida. What did they predict, 15 hurricanes this year? We’ve had four. The end of the season is drawing near, as is the end of the turtle season. By the way, another turtle controversy up here. There aren’t as many showing up. People are very upset, ‘Where are they going?’ They’re upset because they think the beaches are eroding and the authorities down here aren’t replenishing the beaches well enough so the turtles aren’t showing up, all these distractions. But here we’ve had four hurricanes this year; two of them nowhere near the United States; five last year. Who would have ever predicted after the Hurricane Katrina season we had all those hurricanes, 15 of them and then some tropical storms, we went through the whole alphabet of names, and had to go to alpha one and alpha two, and then they all predicted, ‘Oh, this is horrible, global warming, look out, folks, every hurricane is going to be a Katrina, we’re doomed.’ We’ve had nine since that year. Who would have ever predicted that? Every prediction about the past two hurricane seasons has been wrong. I just had to throw that in.
The point is, these fires are worse than hurricanes. But, you know, Brentwood, where O.J. Simpson lived, that’s not far from Malibu. It’s not just a hop, skip, and trip, but it’s not far from Malibu. It’s close enough that people in Brentwood could have helped out if they wanted to. I’ll tell you why I mention this, is that while fires were raging out there in Malibu, Hillary Clinton was celebrating in Brentwood at the home of Meathead, Rob Reiner, on Saturday night, who was singing songs to her. It was a preliminary birthday party. Her big birthday party is going to be some shuck and jive event here on the East Coast. So the Hollywood crowd wanted to give her a pre-birthday bash, which is really nothing more than a fundraiser for Mrs. Clinton. While millions of dollars worth of homes and businesses and family members were literally going up in flames, the Hollywood elite at Meathead’s house, listening to him serenade Hillary Clinton. Actually, I made a mistake, folks. It wasn’t for her, because we all know Mrs. Clinton doesn’t care about money. The Clintons tell us this constantly. They don’t care about money. This was for her campaign, and that means it was for the children.
So having Meathead serenade Mrs. Clinton on Saturday night in Brentwood, not a fundraiser, but for the children. (interruption) I don’t think she did a flyover. I don’t think there was one expression of — well, I don’t know what was said inside there, but I haven’t seen Mrs. Clinton comment on the fires. Now, along with keeping this in context, with my theory that wildfires of this nature are far more damaging and dangerous than hurricanes, in a lot of cases you don’t have the warning. These things with the Santa Anas propelling them, bam! In a tinderbox like that, and it is in the middle of a drought, but they’re always in the middle of a drought, which is the point. You know when it rains in Southern California everybody goes nuts. It’s weird, it doesn’t happen that much, especially torrential downpours. After Katrina hit, all we heard about was, where’s FEMA? Where’s the federal government, and where’s this or that? We have these homeowners, these business owners and the fire department out there and state authorities all on their own.
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
You know what causes the Santa Ana winds, ladies and gentlemen? It’s a high-pressure — a strong, very cold, high-pressure area — air mass that extends unusually far south over the southern Rockies. As you know, in a high-pressure area the winds circulate clockwise and that’s how they end up coming out of the east. You know, we have big, strong winds down there sometimes in October or November sometimes approaching 50 miles an hour with hardly anything in sight. It’s usually because of a giant high over New England, coupled with low pressure down there that just creates winds and sucks it in. That’s what happened. That’s what causes the Santa Anas. I love it! In the midst of global warming, an unusually cold air mass of high pressure is fueling these 60-mile-an-hour winds.