Imagine, for a moment, that Al Gore was now president. Now stop shaking for a minute and think hard. If Gore had built a presidential ranch that was one storey high, got all its electricity from the sun, and was described by the New York Times as a “model of the yuppie modern ranch,” don’t you think it would become an emblem of his presidency? So why hasn’t it happened to Bush? Here’s the Times: “The first lady, Laura Bush, has overseen the planting of native Texas grasses. The house is environmentally correct, with a passive solar design, geothermal cooling and heating, a cistern to catch rainwater and purification tanks and filters so that water from the house can be recycled for use in irrigation.” Does Bush get any credit for this? Do his environmental critics – who have yet to find a substantive difference between Bush’s and Clinton’s environmental policies – acknowledge that Bush is an actual, living, breathing environmentalist? While Gore talked a good game, does he know anything about tending to thousands of acres of actual brush land the way W does? I point this out just to show how lazy the press is. You start with a picture of Bush as a gas-guzzling, arsenic-pushing tool of Big Oil, and you sure as heck try and avoid anything that might complicate this picture. Of course, Bush is partly to blame. Unlike most modern yuppie pols, he doesn’t see his private life as just another propaganda tool. But that doesn’t mean the press shouldn’t notice more. Memo to Rove: how about Bush inviting a couple of environmental journalists to his ranch to show off his energy conservation? How about linking it to a speech that stresses such values in order to help wean us off foreign sources of energy? There’s no need to do a Tom Friedman, but you really do need to tackle this anti-environmental smear that has so far stuck to you.
EURO-INDIFFERENCE: My take on the new currency, posted opposite.
KRISTOF CLEAR: I’ve known Nick Kristof for twenty years or so, since we were at Magdalen, Oxford, together. He’s one of the nicest, smartest guys you can find. He’s also dead wrong about the war. It’s probably good luck that he only started writing his war column for the Times in the last month, because he is one of very few Times’ columnists who weren’t publicly getting things wrong in the beginning. But he’s making up for his absence since. In his last two columns, he has urged the U.S. to let Mullah Omar go and to leave Somalia’s terrorist cells alone. He has the classic Times view that poor countries and foreign peoples need to be treated like peasants by a benevolent overlord. Poor little Omar. He’s blind, you know. He didn’t really mean to sponsor terrorism aimed at murdering thousands of innocents. Can’t we relocate him to Palm Springs? As for Somalia, what’s really needed is lots and lots of aid to help these poor people. Bombing them is only useful for leveraging the international focus into such aid. Huh? Who’s proposing a bombing raid anyway? And isn’t Somalia a prime location for Qaeda refugees? Coming up: why Osama bin Laden should be allowed to go free as long as he promises us that he won’t be naughty any more; and why Iraq just needs more American aid to get it to behave more nicely. Well, at least he isn’t Anthony Lewis. Kristof isn’t a bore as well as naxefve. He’s just naxefve.
The Dish 