Bob Herbert (NYT): Masters of Deception

[Dudley_DUright]

It was snowing and the temperature was headed toward single digits when I left the hotel on Park Avenue Wednesday night. A doorman flagged a cab and I climbed in. I'd just finished an interview with Al Gore and it was hard to shake the melancholy feeling that the man who should be president was spending a stormy night in Midtown Manhattan while the momentous world events he should be shaping were careering in all sorts of dangerous directions.

The former vice president was in town to give a speech on the Bush administration's environmental policies, which he basically described as an exercise in wholesale environmental destruction. Instead of caving in to such special interests as the coal, oil and chemical industries (as the administration has done), Mr. Gore said that the U.S. should be leading the effort to rein in pollution and get control of the potentially devastating problem of global warming.

During the interview, he spoke passionately about the environment and opened his laptop computer to give what amounted to a spontaneous seminar on global warming. He noted that most of the glaciers in the world are melting at an alarming rate and added wryly, "Glaciers don't give a damn about politics. They just reflect reality."

The environmental speech, which he delivered at the Beacon Theater on the Upper West Side yesterday afternoon, is the latest in a series of formal critiques of the administration that Mr. Gore has delivered in recent months. Previous subjects have been national security, economic policy and civil liberties.

more...

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/01/16/opinion/16HERB.html?hp

[HereSince1628]

1. I see careering is still in play, I wonder what gravitas that portends

[hatrack]

2. Damn, Dudley! Beat me to it!

Thanks for posting. ;-)

[Dudley_DUright]

3. My favorite paragraph is the last one

It perfectly reflects my views of the Bushco administration:

"This is insanity," said Mr. Gore, referring to the administration's handling of the environment. But his speech made it clear that he could just as easily have applied that sentiment to the full range of Bush-Cheney policies. History will not be kind to the chicanery that passes for governing in the Bush II administration.

[Demeter]

4. Will There Be Any History After Bush?

Or will we be in a Brave New World, 1984 twenty years off schedule?