Charge: Whitman, Fiorina Torched California Forest for Sport

Sacramento (AP) – In the current edition of The Nation magazine, California Democratic Party chairman John Burton charges Republican gubernatorial candidate Meg Whitman and senate hopeful Carly Fiorina behaved badly during the Tehachapi wildfire emergency last summer which destroyed forty homes.

“Whitman and Fiorina had finished lunch after campaigning in nearby Bakersfield when they saw smoke and decided to go sightseeing in Whitman’s German-made EC135 Eurocopter,” Burton told Katrina vanden Heuvel, editor of The Nation. “Shortly after lifting off, Whitman radioed the Disaster Operations Center to demand that aerial water and fire retardant dumps cease while she and Fiorina toured the scene.”

One witness, an environmentalist who had chained himself to a Bigcone Douglas-fir to protest the fire, texted friends minutes before being engulfed that he had observed an EC135 hovering ten yards off the ground, deliberately using its rotors to ignite new outbreaks.

Another witness reported something similarly troubling. Requesting anonymity, the Chief Justice of the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals told California forestry officials he was hiking out of the area to escape the conflagration when he watched a helicopter land ahead of an advancing wall of fire. He claimed Whitman and Fiorina emerged from the aircraft and proceeded to catch fleeing animals and throw them into the flames.

In the most shocking revelation, a Sierra Club executive, surveying the devastation later, said he spotted Whitman, Fiorina, and Karl Rove toasting marshmallows in the dying embers of seniors Clarence and Wilma Jones’ house as the couple wept close by. Rove, Whitman, and Fiorina then commiserated with insurance company officials who had arrived on the scene to assess the damage to their bottom line.

The Nation has preemptively rejected any criticism for running the piece. “We stand by our story,” said vanden Heuvel, “because it could have happened and there’s no proof it didn’t.”