Friday, March 07, 2003

Nature abhors a vacuum

From the mailbag:

R. Scott Greacen of Portland writes in about my post on Bush's plans to "green" up his image:
"What struck me about this story:

"GOP pollsters are telling their firebrands, especially Bush, that environmental issues are their most serious potential weakness. Thus the fuzzing. Do they really need to bother, though?

"Where are the Democrats on green issues? Basically nowhere. They couldn't even make a decent stink over the latest ungodly rider: that took Sherry Boehlert & co. Any serious commitment to enviro progress at the national level of the Ds seems to have left with Al Gore.

"And the enviros? Hollering, but they don't have the mike, and the movement's been crippled by defunding in the darkest hours we've faced in thirty years.

"All of which, added to the Bush regime's inborn urge to take it all, means they may use softer terms, but they're going to keep up the brutal policies. Which means giving us the means to bring them down, if we can find ways to bring those policies and their effects into focus."

A good point, especially since I agree that I don't expect Democrats to find a spine on environmental issues anytime soon. As I've argued elsewhere, it's going to be up to citizens to lead our leaders in getting us out of this mess. As the brutal environmental policies proceed to wreak their havoc, it's going to be up to us to get the word out, and build up the grass-roots outrage.

[Scott also notes that the wording of my post might "invite the incautious reader to surmise you've overlooked the part about how Lutz wrote all this before the election, and we've been under bombardment with carefully calibrated GOP fuzz-phrases for, well, quite a while now..." True, though I think it was clear from the story that we're talking about a fresh barrage, keying to some degree off that old advice.]

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