Listening to the reactions to the devastating conflagration in Southern California from Republican media sources, I am amazed at what they have persistently omitted. Why isn’t the electoral majority that chose Gov. Gavin Newsom and Mayor Karen Bass not held responsible for the disaster that so far has killed 24 people and destroyed more than 12,000 structures?

As far as I can figure out, these incompetent and ideologically crazed public officials didn’t just appear one day in their offices. Elections took place that put Newsom, Bass, and other woke officeholders in the Golden State in high positions while ostentatiously ignoring wise counsels about protecting forests against wildfires and prioritizing LGBTQ criteria in picking fire chiefs and other vital public servants.

Why can’t Republican news interpreters be more forthcoming and tell the majority of California’s electorate that they brought this curse on themselves?

California voters gave impressive majorities to the mischievous politicians who failed to take the proper measures to avoid the present crisis. Los Angeles voters who elected Bass knew her racialist and culturally radical positions when they chose her as mayor in 2022. That she chose to be in Ghana celebrating the inauguration of an African leader after signs of the wildfire had already presented themselves, or that her lesbian fire commissioner didn’t take proper measures to keep hydrants filled with water, should not have been a surprise to her constituents. She certainly gave evidence of her flakiness before ascending to her present office.

Newsom, who has long embraced leftist positions, crushed conservative talk show host Larry Elder, who is black, in the 2021 recall election. Elder offered a clear alternative to the oleaginous Newsom on social, economic, and environmental policies. Had he won, this raging catastrophe might not be afflicting Los Angeles today. However, voters — including a large majority of California’s black residents — endorsed Newsom enthusiastically. Many even embraced a Los Angeles Times columnist’s description of Elder as “the black face of white supremacy.”

It was, in fact, Elder who distinguished himself from the usual Republican blah-blah artists by telling voters the unvarnished truth. Last week, he blamed California voters and what he called the “lying mainstream media” for the devastating fires, arguing the media has shielded politicians like Newsom and Bass for years. Rather than simply targeting Democrats and a handful of public officials, Elder said the majority who voted against him — and the slavish media outlets that, in his view, slandered him to protect Democratic dominance — are now enduring the predictable results of their political conceits.

It is hard for me to shed too many tears over the rich wokesters in Pacific Palisades, who have seen their pleasure domes destroyed. These pompous parvenus contributed heavily to the disastrous government ruining California with their votes, donations, and political campaigning. Although there’s nothing wrong with discussing the extent of the damage and the losses suffered by perfectly decent people, at least some of the victims should be held to account for their stupid, perverse political actions. I’m sorry that Eugene Levy, who is my favorite comedian but also a wacko leftist, saw his Palisades spread burn down. But I’m afraid that his politics and those of his friends had something to do with this tragic outcome.

I was also disappointed to hear the mollycoddling treatment accorded to Patrick Soon-Shiong, owner of the Los Angeles Times, in a recent Fox News interview. Soon-Shiong claimed he and his paper care about “competence, not party” in their assessment of Los Angeles leaders. But his paper until last week was the slobbering handmaiden of Bass and other nutty leftist California politicians. Soon-Shiong bears major blame for what happened over the last week.

My friend John Zmirak in a recent column for the Stream compared the fate of California to the firebombing of Dresden and other German cities during World War II. Although terrible things happened then to hapless civilians, historians always remind us that the Nazi government had something to do with this destruction. We are also usually told that lots of Germans voted for Hitler’s party, although, as Zmirak observes, the Nazis never came even close to winning a majority of German voters in a fair election.

The flaky maniacs and demagogues who run California won with vast majorities. Yet, our Republican politicians and their obliging “conservative” media can’t bring themselves to point out this inconvenient fact. This is the same nonsense they give us when they pretend that other leftist ideologues like Alvin Bragg, Larry Krasner, and Fani Willis are just the Frankenstein creations of George Soros. The last time I checked, these lunatics were democratically elected.

Why is Larry Elder almost isolated on the right in assigning proper blame for what is happening in California? Why can’t Republican news interpreters be more forthcoming and tell the majority of California’s electorate that they brought this curse on themselves — by their freely given political choices?