The key factor behind the Carolina wildfires

To address the most important point up front: the wildfires currently spreading across North and South Carolina are tragic.

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Thousands of acres have been burned by hundreds of fires since Saturday, taking property and placing livelihoods at risk. There are no reports of fire-driven deaths, as yet, but evacuations have been ordered and emergency declarations made. Firefighters continue to struggle to bring the blazes under control.

The causes include unusually dry conditions and wind gusts of up to 40 mph. That said, the Carolina fires may have a positive result that will be felt coast to coast, and especially in California they're likely to quell all that stupid talk about attaching strings to federal wildfire disaster relief. That threat has been made by Trump; his disaster czar, Ric Grenell; House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.); Sen. John Barrasso (R-Wyo.), a member of that chamber's GOP leadership; and Rep. Byron Donalds (R-Fla.), among many others. Also pitching in are members of the right-wing peanut gallery, such as Fox News mouthpieces Sean Hannity and Jesse Watters.

What they've tend to have in common is a focus on California policies that had nothing to do with the fires in Pacific Palisades and Altadena but have been long-term targets of conservatives and Republicans.

Grenell called for the California Coastal Commission to be "defunded," for instance. He didn't explain what that had to do with the fires, but he called its policies "crazy woke left," whatever that means. (The commission's authority to regulate real estate development in the coastal zone, thus angering the developers who are among the GOP's patrons, may have more to do with Grenell's complaint.)

The others' points were equally nonsensical. Trump rehearsed his long-discredited claim that California's water supply has been wasted to serve the interests of the tiny delta smelt, an innocent bystander. Johnson talked of "our concerns with the governance of the state of California," which he airily blamed for "complicity ... in the scope of disaster."