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Ramblings From the Ragged Crumbling Edge Of The Reality-Based Community

Wednesday, June 04, 2008

Talking Our Childrens' Future To Death 

...the usual cast of Republican characters are working hard to serve their corporate masters by killing the most sweeping Senate bill addressing climate change to ever come to the floor of that depressingly dysfunctional body. They are doing so by dragging around a red herring about delayed votes for judicial nominees, but the clear truth of the matter is that they are scrambling to find ways to strangle the legislation without making it seem that they are a part of that small percentage of Americans who believe that a healthy return on investment for those industries who have traditionally been their biggest sugar daddies is more important that a healthy environment for my children...

There is a certain, but oddly familiar, sort of strangeness to the controversy over these three judicial nominees who are supposedly at the heart of this delay. Anybody who was really paying attention at the time can't help but recall the infamous but little-remembered Orrin Hatch - Bob Dole influence on President Bill Clinton's judicial nominees at the end of Clinton's second term. Well before this point in Bill Clinton's term, they were calling on him to cease nominating federal judge candidates in order to let the next president to fill the vacancies (maybe they just had a hunch that the next president would be a Republican)...

Beyond all the "tit for tat" talk, the three nominees in question - Peter Keisler, Robert Conrad, and Steve Matthews are all such extremely conservative legal beagles that they would be incapable of stumbling onto the political and judicial middle ground with the help of a GPS unit and a map and a compass, not to mention a bread-crumb trail left by some forest waif...but all of this is a cheap diversion...

Republicans, by and large, do not want legislation that makes any sort of honest effort to combat global climate change. It places too much pressure on the bottom line of the corporations that have spent so many years providing generous contributions to Republican coffers in order to prevent the sorts of turmoil that responsible environment stewardship would create for stockholders' dividends and annual profit margins. Laying the blame on "delayed votes on judicial nominations" has a nice, falsly principled ring that obscures the real reasons for the monkeywrenching. Republicans understand that they are in a bind right now and can't really seem to be opposing environmental reforms that could have a monstrous impact on the children that we brought into this world and have loved and nurtured with hope for a bright future. That they don't actually care is a well understood fact of life, as is the fact that they are desperately trying to forestall the predicted November carnage. It may be a bit disappointing, from a Panglossian point of view, to see them trying to talk the climate change legislation to death, but it certainly isn't surprising...
Posted by: Jack K. / 7:49 PM 0 comments

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