Been peppered with emails goading me to accuse George W. Bush of a breath-taking U-turn on carbon dioxide emissions. I liked his campaign policy best. But, to be honest, I hadn’t even been aware of it till he reversed it, which must also be the case for almost the entire press corps. The Wall Street Journal points out today that the single sentence about CO2 in a September 29 speech went unreported anywhere, except the Dow Jones Energy Report and an AP item making fun of Bush’s pronunciation of “dioxide.” The Journal also points out that, in his reversal, Bush probably won back his core supporters, rather than betraying them. It’s also true that Bush’s CO2 position was even more ambitious than Gore’s. In policy terms, this is a real story. I think the evidence for global warming is extremely impressive, and some painful shifts in our energy policy are probably required to minimize the damage. But in political terms, this is a huge non-event. Sorry, but no cigar here for Salon writers. I’m hoping that the first real U-turn will be on the estate tax.
WISDOM OF HOMER: I referred recently to Homer Simpson’s endorsement of the theory of repressed memory. A reader sent in the exact quote, addressed to Lisa: “Take your anger and squeeze it into a tight little ball, and then release it at an inappropriate time. Remember when daddy hit that referee with the whiskey bottle? Hmm? Yeah…”
The Dish 