It's "The Butch Lumbar Show"! And now, here's Butch!
Good morning. Welcome to Tuesday...that is, unless the liberals have cancelled Tuesday! They haven't cancelled Tuesday, have they? No? Good!
I like Tuesdays, because Tuesday is the day we start our program with reader letters. Today's kickoff is from Pete M. of Kalispell, Montana. It's a good one--but it's a little long, so I'm just going to summarize for you.
Pete writes that he was leaving work the other day when he spotted huge columns of smoke coming up from the ridge above Kalispell, up on the Flathead National Forest. Now, Pete knows as well as I do that there should be no such thing as a government-run "national" forest--but he wanted to be a good citizen, so he called in to the local Forest Service headquarters to report this forest fire.
He was told it wasn't a forest fire at all, but a "controlled burn." He asked what that meant, and was told it was Forest Service employees up in the woods "burning slash." Well, what's "slash"? he asked. They told him slash was forest debris--limbs and whatnot left over from logging operations, thinning, and so forth. Okay, said Pete--but why burn it?
I want to pause here to make sure my listeners are seated for the answer Pete got from the good folks at Flathead National Forest. Are you sitting down? Because this...this is what's wrong with government from the ground up.
The Forest Service employees were burning the slash, Pete was told, because--now get this. Be sure to get this, so you can tell your friends out there in Lumbar Land. They...they were burning the slash because...drum roll, please...because...it was a fire hazard.
Can you believe it? Can you believe what the geniuses in our federal government are doing with your tax dollars? They were afraid that this forest material would burn up...so they set it...on...fire.
