Skewering the GOP

Via Josh Marshall, John Edwards on the recent flap over Howard Dean's filleting of the GOP:

Howard and I have been saying the same thing about this for years. Hear that? The same thing. For years. Have I ever put it some way that Howard wouldn't agree with? Probably. And he put it in a way, once, just the other day, that I can't agree with, since I come from a place where hard-working people, who are better served by the agenda and passion of the Democrats, somehow still vote Republican. But Howard and I are committed to a 50-state strategy that will reach out to those voters, in North Carolina, and in Kansas, and in Tennessee, across this country and tell the truth about what is happening in this country to their jobs, to their health care, to their forests and streams, to their vision of what this country is and should be.

Good for him. The tendency of beltway Democrats to hide under a chair every time a fellow Democrat uses strong language to rip the Republicans and their harmful policies and politics is embarrassing. Howard Dean, unexposed to the miasma of a typical DC summer day, understands that people are either angry or bewildered over what Republicans are attempting to do in Washington, and they'd like someone in the Democratic Party to speak up. And good for Hillary Clinton for joining the parade.

"There has never been an administration, I don't believe, in our history more intent upon consolidating and abusing power to further their own agenda," she said of President Bush.

"Whether it's the right to organize and be part of the American labor movement … whether it's the right to be able to be have a choice when it comes to the most private and intimate decisions that a woman has to make, whether it is to protect the environment whatever it is that we slowly but surely built up during the 20th century, this current administration and their allies in Congress want to turn the clock back on all of that," Clinton said.

Speaking at a New York fundraiser, she also noted that for Republicans, facts tend to be "inconvenient." Really?

A White House official who once led the oil industry's fight against limits on greenhouse gases has repeatedly edited government climate reports in ways that play down links between such emissions and global warming, according to internal documents.

In handwritten notes on drafts of several reports issued in 2002 and 2003, the official, Philip A. Cooney, removed or adjusted descriptions of climate research that government scientists and their supervisors, including some senior Bush administration officials, had already approved. In many cases, the changes appeared in the final reports.

The dozens of changes, while sometimes as subtle as the insertion of the phrase "significant and fundamental" before the word "uncertainties," tend to produce an air of doubt about findings that most climate experts say are robust.

Mr. Cooney is chief of staff for the White House Council on Environmental Quality, the office that helps devise and promote administration policies on environmental issues.

Before going to the White House in 2001, he was the "climate team leader" and a lobbyist at the American Petroleum Institute, the largest trade group representing the interests of the oil industry. A lawyer with a bachelor's degree in economics, he has no scientific training.

Speak up, Dr. Dean. Unleash the oratory, Hillary!