Insta-Pundit Is Making Sense!

It is a vast, vast improvement:

Insta-pundit.com: Montana Sen. Conrad Burns irrationally lit into weary crew members from the Forest Service's Augusta Hotshots after encountering them at the Billings airport, awaiting their flight home. He chastised them for doing a "poor job" fighting the fire. After his unprovoked attack on the firefighters, Burns reiterated his criticism to a representative of the Montana Department of Natural Resources and Conservation. "See that guy over there?" Burns said. "He hasn't done a God-damned thing. They sit around. I saw it up on the Wedge fire and in northwestern Montana some years ago. It's wasteful. You probably paid that guy $10,000 to sit around. It's gotta change."

Burns' remarks were characteristic of the kind of know-nothing blather you sometimes hear from the local malcontent in a bar or coffee shop.... His belief that a firefighter could be paid $10,000 for a week's work is proof that Burns is completely out of touch. The only people we know paid exorbitantly for doing nothing wear suits in Washington, D.C., not yellow shirts on the fire line. Fighting a major wildfire can be a massive undertaking most akin to a military campaign. It takes tremendous manpower, equipment, supplies and logistical support. Danger is inherent and, to most people, obvious. The work can be backbreaking and exhausting, but the hardest work almost always is accomplished out of public view - certainly beyond the line of sight available from anyone's air-conditioned ranch house, the local bar or the Billings airport. Perhaps "on the Wedge fire and in northwestern Montana some years ago" Burns saw firefighters at rest, between shifts on the fire line or in transit, but it's obvious he's never been close enough to a fire to see anyone work...