Exaggeration of the opposition's statement to make a point is an intellectually weak and dishonest debating tactic.

No one is talking about clear cutting the forests, contrary to what the extremists are claiming. What's being proposed is to remove dead trees and to thin out some of the live ones. As it is, decades of very aggressive firefighting and restrictions against thinning have caused huge amounts of fuel to accumulate. This makes the fires much worse than normal. It doesn't help firefighting efforts when forest roads have been forbidden and closed, too.

Fire is a part of the natural forest lifecycle. However, forestry and environmental policies for the past 100 years have made things worse. In megafires like the Hayman or the one down in Arizona, not only do the trees burn more fiercely than normal, the ground gets cooked, making post-fire erosion much worse. Right now, we're spending millions trying to keep the topsoil from washing away in the area affected by the Hayman fire. Most of this would not have been necessary if a sane forestry policy was in place.