Cleaner hot air

David Brooks. Ah, David Brooks. He works hard to sound like a meaningful moderate. A receptacle of reason. A font of fortitude.

When in reality he's a fulsome fool [ed. So foolish that he gets paid to spout off in the pages of the Times, while you, Snidely Whiplash, write dyspeptic diatribes in between dehumanizing tasks in a corporate office. So, who's the fool?]

But today Brooks has truly jumped the shark. Saying, basically, "Can't we all just get along" in the debate over environmental policy, he writes,

"The first thing to be said is that air pollution trends are unchanged under President Bush. For the past three decades, the quality of our air has steadily improved. Air pollution from the six major pollutants has decreased by 48 percent over that time, even though our economy has grown by 164 percent. If you look at the charts showing that decline, you can't tell when the Clinton era ended and the Bush era began."

Hmmm, for the past three decades, air quality has improved, but he can't see any change over the past three years. Um, David, that's because Bush has not yet succeeded in dismantling all of the provisions of the Clean Air Act, but he keeps trying. Give us four more years of Bush's compassionate conservatism and I suspect we'll see some changes in air quality.

He goes on,

"The Bush administration's biggest air pollution failure has been its inability to restart the global warming debate. There is ample evidence that we have a long-term global warming problem, and the sooner we address it the better. The old approach, the Kyoto treaty, was never going to be ratified by the Senate. But the administration could have moved aggressively to find another way forward. Instead it proposed a pitiable voluntary program, which has had no effect."

Woah, Nelly. Perhaps the reason the administration has failed to "restart" the global warming debate is because the administration has denied that humans are the cause of any such thing.

"The administration's biggest success has been its regulation of diesel fuels. In the face of fierce industry hostility, the Bush crowd decided that the benefits of diesel regulation far outweighed the costs. The Bush initiatives were applauded by even its most ardent critics. An official from the Natural Resources Defense Council called the diesel emissions regulations 'the most significant public health proposal in decades.'"

Ouch, I snorted coffee up my nose when I read that corker. As Kevin Drum recently rebutted another weak-minded attempt to throw sand in our eyes to defend the Bush administration's environmental record, those were Clinton-era regulations. All Bush did was to not act to rescind those regulations.

"This is yet another issue around which it would be easy to build a sensible majority if things were judged on their merits. Instead, we've got paralysis."

Oh, I get it. Bush would be cleaning our air and water, improving our gas mileage, and protecting all God's creatures if it weren't for a few obstructionist Senators who don't want him to accomplish anything that would burnish his already sterling environmental credentials.

This beggars belief. Where oh where has my New York Times gone? Safire may be a loon, but at least he's not a "Liar for Bush." (Shaking fist and looking heaven-ward) "Damn you, Bill Keller!"

Moreover, Easterbrook's and Brook's arguments are so similar as to feel...oh, I'm just getting paranoid. But I definitely sense talking points getting drafted by the RNC to make Bush look like he's the greenest Republican since Teddy Roosevelt.