The Jerk

As I've written before, the single best compendium for all things anti-Bush is Dan Froomkin's daily blog "White House Watch" in the Washington Post, which I've been reading regularly (religiously, you could say -- I cling to it) for about a year. The blog is always 5 pages long, yet the astounding thing is that Dan never lacks material. A lot of the blog consists of excerpts and quotes from other writing and newspaper accounts, but he uses a great deal of original source material as well. Today, for example, he includes citations to a National Defense University study which concluded that the Iraq war has been a "debacle," the sort of "deep" research you almost never see in the mainstream press anymore.

Indeed, Bush has been such a terrible failure on every front that Froomkin's major difficulty is probably the process of exclusion; there is so much negative news to deal with on a daily basis that inevitably a lot of Bush's destructive activity must go unremarked. I've written about this before, the President's protean capacity for generating bad news, his Bizarro-Midas Touch.

Froomkin today quotes Sigmar Gabriel, the German Minister for the Environment (their equivalent of our Environmental Destruction Agency), on Bush's recent Rose Garden "initiative" on global warming. Herr Gabriel called Bush's speech "Neanderthal," but perhaps that's an insult to proto-humans everywhere, including those in GEICO commercials. Bush proposed a regime in which the United States would stop the growth in greenhouse emissions by U.S. polluters (particularly power-generating plants) by the year 2025. If I understand him correctly, Bush is saying that the amount of CO2 and other heat-trapping gases released into the atmosphere may continue to increase every year between now and 2025, at which point, presumably, the emissions would be "forced" to level off at whatever toxic level they had achieved in the interim.

Bush, in 2025, will be about 80 years old and completely irrelevant to American life except as a footnote for historians seeking presidencies comparable in disastrous consequences to James Buchanan and Herbert Hoover. His "idea" seems to have nothing to do with dealing with climate change. Why did he say anything at all, let alone something this insultingly stupid? I think the answer may be simpler than we think. Bush enjoys being a jerk. It doesn't go a lot deeper than that. It's his form of a sick practical joke. We should never forget that he's capable of joking about things that are deadly serious for other people. He joked about not finding weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, for example, and yet since that was the putative reason for the invasion, his little pantomime (which was corny and dumb, at that) amounts to laughing off 4,000 American deaths, 30,000+ wounded soldiers, many with very serious injuries, and an untold (because his Administration won't bother to count) number of Iraqi lives destroyed, probably in the hundreds of thousands.

Bush doesn't care about global warming. He doesn't believe in it, he doesn't take it seriously, and he's spent his whole presidency dodging a real response to it. Way back in 2000 I recall thinking that his election could bring on a disaster of unprecedented scope because we risked eight years of inaction on the critical issue facing the human race. Bush was much worse than I thought he would be, than I thought he could be. The reason he proposed something so ridiculous is because it amuses him to find an "initiative" so far removed from anything effective that it's like proposing absolutely nothing. He's saying: see, you want me to react to this ridiculous crisis made up by liberal scientists, so I'm going to propose that the U.S. increase its CO2 for the next 18 years. Get it? His utterly delights in being so contrary. And despite the devastating effects, God help us all, he thinks it's funny.

George Bush and the problem of climate change

George W. Bush is a tricky and sneaky guy, and routinely overrates his ability to get away with various evasions and shortcuts which have characterized his private and public life. When faced with a challenge, his first instinct is to find some way not to meet it. For example, when summoned to jury duty for a drunk driving case (in 1996 in Texas), he thought it was a better approach to beg off his civic responsibility with a specious objection that he might be called on to "pardon" or "commute" the sentence of the defendant in his role as governor. This laughable "conflict of interest" gave him a way to avoid disclosing his own conviction for drunk driving twenty years before. When he engaged in insider trading at Harken Energy, he omitted the SEC's required disclosure forms. When caught and exposed, he explained that he thought his "lawyer took care of that."

So it goes. As proof the tiger does not change its stripes (or, maybe more appropriate, the ass his donkey ears), Bush has blown the dust off his "20 in 10" idea to deal with global warming. This is his "radical" proposal to reduce the use of gasoline by 20% by 2017, as measured against the sum of current use + projected growth by such date. Catchy. Since even his handpicked weirdoes at the Supreme Court could not bail him out, Bush and the EPA are under High Court order to comply with the Clean Air Act, which has determined that CO2 is a pollutant under Nixon's landmark legislation. You see how far we've fallen: Nixon was a comparative progressive. Nothing can be done, the Smirking Chimp contends, until the end of 2008. In other words, the end of his term. Thus and always, Bush does everything he can to ensure disaster. There is simply no bottom to the evil this man does.

I'm beginning to think it's very late in the game to deal with global warming anyway. As I've posted before, my first thought when it became apparent Bush would be appointed to the presidency in 2000 was that his idiotic obstructionism came at exactly the wrong time in human history. We had to get going on this problem of climate change, and America had to take the lead. Instead - we got him. What does that mean? Maybe the gaia-as-organism people are on to something, satirists like the late great Kurt Vonnegut. Mother Earth herself gave us Bush simply to finish us off. I recall too the haunting words of Inez Fung, researcher and climate scientist extraordinaire at last year's China-U.S. Climate Change conference at Berkeley. The first thing she wanted us to know, as she stood at the podium in a plenary session at Wheeler Auditorium, was that the scientists who studied this matter closely, as their life's work, "were very, very scared." I think it's remarkable that so many of the manifestations of global warming have already arrived. The accelerating loss of the Arctic polar ice pack, the vortex winds in Antarctica and the six-year drought in Australia, the melting of 75% of the world's glaciers, the extreme weather events, the unprecedented off-season wildfires. I would surmise that these events were within the horizon of probability of scientists like Inez Fung and Steven Chu at Berkeley, and James Hansen at NASA. Yet because they have constantly been pushed to the wall by the "skeptics" and their corrupt political accomplices, such as Bush and Joe Barton, the execrable Republican from Texas, and James Inhofe of Oklahoma, the Grand Dragon of Apocalyptic Obscurantism, they have been forced to couch their scientific forecasts in moderate terms, conceding minor points and ranges of "error," so as not to lose their credibility. Or their funding. And thus diluting the full impact of the predictions they would really like to make, as intimated by Inez Fung's opening comment.

But as for me, and as for nearly everyone else -- I'm not a scientist, and I'm not seeking funding. I'm a member of homo sapiens with a sensory apparatus who looks around at the world, and I realize that as tricky and devious as Bush tries to be, he is not going to be able to fool the troposphere or the oceans. The ecosphere is not the SEC or the Texas court system, or the compliant Washington press. The atmosphere moves and changes according to its own chemical and physical laws. It is not impressed by numbers games, by the idea that 2017's CO2 concentrations could have been worse. CO2 levels rise, the troposphere traps infrared radiation from the Earth, the oceans acidify, the world warms up. And all hell breaks loose, as an incomprehensibly complicated interplay of weather patterns, albedo loss and solar absorption, pest migration and infestation, torrential rain and nonending drought, descend upon human life. Shuck and jive all you want, Mr. Bush. Yours won't be the last smirk.