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It’s been a bad morning for John Cole. “Sometimes I wake up and read the papers and just want to scream,” he writes. Why? Because 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,” reports the New York Times. Here’s Cole:
Do they think this is a school project, and all they have to do is fool the teacher and climate change won’t be an issue? I don’t want junk science or unfounded claims going forward, either, but it is becoming pretty clear to me that faith-based governance simply means that anything you don’t like or anything that might require a change in your policy position should be ignored or labeled “junk science.”
Not that righty bloggers are much happier. Arthur Chrenkoff, for example, links to Debra Burlingame’s Wall Street Journal op-ed about “how the trendy left is hijacking 9/11’s Ground Zero to commemorate just about everyone and anything but the victims of Islamofascist terrorism.” Chrenkoff has some harsh words for said “trendy left”:
It’s clear that to many on the left the 3,000 who died in the rubble of Twin Towers are no more than a nuisance, because their untimely demise have served to open a veritable Republican Pandora’s Box of nasties such as neo-conservatism, the democracy crusade, war in Iraq, the Patriot Act, and Guantanamo.
The lesson: history’s losers should not be allowed to build society’s monuments.
Ah, the blog version of civilized discourse. It’s almost enough to make you chuck your computer out the window.
Garrett Graff, who noted yesterday that Democrats.com is offering $1000 cash to anyone who asks, and can get President Bush to answer, a specific question on the Downing Street Memo, says the organization has offered $250 to Reuters’ Steve Holland for his question on the matter, though rumor has it that Holland won’t accept the award. (We hesitate to link Graff twice in one week, but we’re willing to make an exception for the man who first brought us this, even if it might have been sort of fake.) “[P]erhaps we’re seeing a new wave of pay-for-play journalism,” writes Graff. “If enough organizations start putting up money to see their points of view represented in the press briefing, being a White House reporter could become as lucrative as say, male prostitution. Oh. Wait. …”
Finally, we turn to Rebecca Blood for a bit of sanity on the whole “lactivists” dustup. (A summary: Barbara Walters said she was uncomfortable with public breastfeeding, so 200 women — who dubbed themselves, excruciatingly, “lactivists” — protested ABC’s headquarters Monday.) Jumping off a line in the Times story linked above alleging that “[s]ome doctors attribute the decline [in breast feeding] to self-consciousness and the difficulties of finding spaces where nursing seems acceptable,” Blood finds the middle ground:
Isn’t this the traditional purpose of the baby shawl? Both to warm the baby and provide the mother with a bit of modesty when she’s feeding her child. This seems like a balance that can be easily achieved. Anyone who has gotten so far from human nature that the sight of a working breast offends them needs to get over it; and it doesn’t take much to throw a towel over your shoulder when you’re feeding your child.
And so this blog report ends on a happy note: If compromise can be found between lactivists and the breast-phobic, after all, perhaps there’s hope for everyone. Maybe Suburban Guerilla and Kim du Toit can lay down their weapons, share a drink, and watch some TV. Maybe, just maybe, they can bond over back-to-back episodes of “Queer Eye for the Straight Guy” and the “Blue Collar Comedy Tour.”
Hey, we can dream.
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