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By\u00a0Monica Showalter
\nAmerican Thinker<\/p>\n
A sudden, unexpected, and devastating fire has destroyed the lovely little heritage town of Lahaina on Maui, which for\u00a0Hawaii, was also a vibrant tourist destination. Thirty-six people at last count were killed and given that this is early in the catastrophe and communications about evacuations were down early, it\u00a0may rise. The town and all its historic artifacts, its Front Street promenade, named one of the “top ten greatest streets”\u00a0by the American Planning Association, are gone. Lahaina’s\u00a0giant banyan tree, planted in 1873, and the largest in the U.S., is subject to on-again, off-again reports about whether it survived the inferno. We still don’t know.<\/p>\n
Here in California, pretty much everyone is affected — with huge numbers of us\u00a0having\u00a0family and friends who live in Hawaii and almost\u00a0everyone having vacationed there. San Francisco’s mayor, London Breed, was\u00a0reportedly vacationing on Maui<\/a>\u00a0when this happened. My sister was scheduled to fly into Maui on Friday for a layover on her way to San Diego. Right now, I’m\u00a0not too hopeful about that happening. It’s sad as can be, and natural for people to try to make sense of it because it was such a freak, total disaster. One day all is fine — and within minutes, it’s all gone.<\/p>\n But some characters are yawping the stupidest, most unhelpful, knee-jerk explanations on a disaster they cannot possibly know the cause of, glibly blaming it all on\u00a0global warming and conservatives, of course.<\/p>\n Some choice examples:<\/p>\n <\/p>\n