Leadership Quote by Cathy McMorris

The line is built to do two jobs at once: mourn the spectacle of fire while assigning blame before anyone can pin it on her side. McMorris doesn’t lead with climate, drought, or development; she leads with “not acceptable,” a phrase that signals managerial competence rather than ecological complexity. The fires aren’t framed as a slow-motion collision of heat, fuel loads, and land-use policy. They’re framed as an avoidable failure of governance.

“Because of poor management on our forests” is the pivot. It’s less diagnosis than narrative: forests burn, therefore someone mismanaged them, therefore the solution is to “take action.” That last phrase is doing heavy political lifting. Action here usually codes for logging, thinning, expedited permits, weaker environmental review, and fewer constraints on the Forest Service. “Big kill” (likely a stumble toward “beetle kill”) is a useful villain: dead trees feel tangible, and they let policymakers talk about fuel without talking about fossil fuels.

The repetition of “because of” creates a causal chain that sounds intuitive on TV, even if wildfire science is messier. The subtext is an argument against procedural restraint: catastrophic fires happen “when we are not able to take action,” implying that lawsuits, regulations, and bureaucracy are the real accelerants. Contextually, this fits the long-running Western political script where wildfire becomes a referendum on land management, and “management” becomes shorthand for extracting or clearing more, faster. It’s urgency as persuasion: if you oppose the proposed fixes, you’re tolerating the flames.