Bloviators in the wind

 (In which the Blob, like Andy Dufresne, once again crawls through half a mile of s***-smelling foulness to escape Sportsball World. Those who wish to leave the room know the standard protocol.)

Sometimes the cross you bear for being from Indiana is having to admit you're from Indiana. We remain, after all, the state that once tried to legislate the value of pi.

Therefore, this morning, I declare this: Yes, I am from Indiana.

And, yes, one of my senators is the illustrious Jim "Bag O' Hammers" Banks, who recently joined several other bags of hammers to venture into the realm of satire without realizing it.

Here's what Jimbo said: "Every Summer, Canada burns. Every summer, we have to deal with their heavy smoke & hazardous air quality. Every Summer, they tell us they'll take action to fix this mess & they never do. Our patience has run out, the time for excuses is over, & if they won't fix this, we will."

Before you ask, no, this is not The Onion. Or Babylon Bee or an Andy Borowitz post or that of any other satirist. Jimbo and his fellow bloviators in the wind actually said this.

Being a former journalist, I can already envision the headlines.

Banks Decries "Invasion" Of Canadian Wildfire Smoke; "This Aggression Will Not Stand, Man," He Says, Unwittingly Quoting The Dude.

Banks Demands Canada Put The Damn Fires Out; Says "We Can't Breathe," Unwittingly Quoting George Floyd.

And so on.

In any event, Banks and his fellow BOHs say it's merely a matter of better forest management on Canada's part, and if the hosers refuse to to do it, why, the U.S. will step in and do it for them. We are, after all, masters at forest management. It's why, every Summer, we have only 13 times more wildfires than Canada does, producing mega-volumes more smoke.

Of course, Banks doesn't address that. And he doesn't say exactly how the U.S. would "step in and do it for them." Do we send in the 82nd Airborne to seize Canada's forestry service? Invade western Canada with an army of patriotic Americans wielding giant brooms? Build a wall of mammoth industrial fans to blow all that Canadian smoke back across the border? ("Mass deportation NOW!" you can imagine the MAGA crowd howling).

Now, I'm not saying the wildfire smoke isn't bad. It is. Even here in Fort Wayne, hundreds of miles from the fires, you can both see it in the air and smell it right now. It's frankly pretty crazy it's this bad this far away.

But what do Banks and the rest of the clowns want to do, start a war over it? Demand that Canada control the jet stream or we will? And what about the smoke from our own wildfires?

Because Canada isn't the only place that's burning this summer. So is Minnesota. And that smoke's blowing northwest to southeast, too.

Look. I know Banks and the rest of the dopes think they can control nature, but there's a long and disastrous history of what happens when humans try. Especially when the humans in question are our elected pinheads, and what they come up with is as vague and frankly absurd as this is.

 See, the bottom line here is you can't stop wildfires from happening, because they've been happening for millennia with or without forest management. You can't stop their smoke from riding the wind, because, well, it's the wind. And the bad part is they're only going to get worse as the planet warms and folks like Jim Banks deny human activity has anything to do with it.

Because climate change doesn't exist, you know. It's all a myth cooked up by commie socialist fascist libtards to keep America from being great.

So there goes one solution, or at least a mitigation, that might actually work.

Another, of course, is sending American crews to Canada to help fight the fires -- just as Canada (and Mexico) has done for us. But, nah, we'd rather threaten people. Because that's what our muscle-y new America is all about these days.

Unfortunately, as Bag O' Hammers and his ilk demonstrated this week, some of that muscle is in their heads.

Now about that jet stream ...