Last One To Ignore Stormy Weather

I don’t know if anyone has noticed, but I’ve tried to stay away from critiquing idiot columnists lately because I thought there were more substantive things that needed to be said on a whole range of other issues. Still, though, it is impossible to escape some of the truly odious drivel generated by our corporate media.

Yesterday’s Philadelphia Inquirer provided more of the same in this regard; Mark Bowden wrote about a cutting-edge issue impacting the lives of many rich white people, and that would be the faulty construction of leaky gas cans that makes it difficult form him to mow the grass on his Chester County, PA farm house property (here - would at least an illustration of the faulty can as opposed to an off-subject cartoon be too much to ask for here, Inky?).

And of course we were also treated to Smerky lambasting Dubya (mildly, to be sure) and the presidential candidates for not talking about Osama bin Forgotten (there goes Smerky, taking on the powerful “pro-bin Laden” lobby again – seriously, what else are the candidates going to say?).

The topper of this sad, mediocre bunch, though, was undoubtedly Jonathan Last (here), who criticized the Democrats and Al Gore on global warming. I’ll let Last take it from here…

You'd think Democrats could nominate anyone - Lindsay Lohan, Rosie O'Donnell, even John Edwards - and win the White House in 2008.

Oh, how clever you are, Last! I’m sure you and your fellow travelers at The National Review and The Weekly Standard had a good chortle at your absurd association of John Edwards in this regard.

Well then, let me present the following graphic showing the results of an online poll at The Daily Kos as to who “won” the Democratic debate last night…

I know that Edwards is a natural favorite among bloggers in general because he came out first with proposals and positions on Iraq, health care, and other vital issues, but this is still something to be proud of. I also know that this won’t make a bit of difference to Last and his fellow freepers, who will continue to perpetuate the “haircut/fancy house/hedge fund” narrative regardless (and add to that this post from Dick Polman, who criticized Edwards for supposedly not giving a straight answer on whether or not he read the National Intelligence Estimate prior to the war; as if that is an issue considering all he has done to try and end the Iraq nightmare).

Because no matter who their nominee is, the pitch is the same: During George W. Bush's watch, New York City was pummeled; New Orleans was destroyed; America became entangled in two wars, neither of which is going great; gas went over $3 a gallon; and the value of your home is now plummeting. Vote Democrat: How could things be worse?

Still amazing to me how partisans as bald faced as Last can rattle all of this off just like we can and pretend that Dubya somehow isn’t to blame to one degree or another – if this happened during Clinton’s administration (or another Democrat politician; nice one, Last, you creep) with a Repug congress, we would need a score card to keep track of all of the investigating committees.

Well, as a partial answer, there's House Resolution 2082, the Intelligence Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2008.

One of the few things on which everyone agrees is the suboptimal state of America's intelligence apparatus. It misjudged Russia's strength during the Cold War, failed to detect the 9/11 threat of al-Qaeda, and told us that Saddam Hussein had WMDs. Our spooks are 0 for 3 on the big intelligence questions of the last 25 years.

We could argue about the preceding paragraph forever and I would never be able to persuade Last or people like him (you see, Last, not everyone agrees with you – I don’t know what journalism training you allegedly have, but if you had been instructed by the individuals who once instructed me at Temple, you would never have been able to get away with this nonsense, to say nothing of wondering why Chris Satullo, the editorial page editor, thought this was acceptable copy). I will only instead provide this link to a “60 Minutes” interview with Richard Clarke in March 2004; I realize he was hawking his book, but he served four presidents, including three Republicans – I’ll take his word on these matters over Last in a heartbeat.

Finally back in power, Democrats had a chance to try to improve our intelligence capabilities with the new budgeting act. Their big idea: that U.S. intelligence agencies spend critical resources gathering information on . . . global warming.

H.R. 2082, which passed the House by a vote of 225 to 197, requires that American intelligence agencies come up with a 30-year National Intelligence Estimate on the security effects of climate change. (Because this is an intelligence bill, the ultimate cost of this little sideshow will be, naturally, classified.)

Nothing wrong with studying climatology. To the contrary, we should be doing so in a diligent and serious manner. But to graft that task onto our intelligence services - during a time of war, no less - is ludicrously irresponsible.

Really, Last?

This takes you to an ABC News story explaining how our former military officials, including Gen. Charles F. Wald, the former deputy commander for the U.S. European Command, testified before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee that global warming is a “threat multiplier.”

And this takes you to a story in the Guardian from February 2004 documenting how the Pentagon tried to explain to Dubya (good luck) that climate change over the next 20 years “could result in a global catastrophe costing millions of lives in wars and natural disasters...the threat to the world is greater than terrorism.”

Someone is being “ludicrously irresponsible” all right, Last. Go polish off your mirror and take a look.

Not that we should be surprised. Democrats have been trying to make environmentalism a national security issue for a long time.

That’s because, as I’ve just noted, environmentalism (re: the climate crisis) is a national security issue!!

In his 1996 State of the Union address, President Bill Clinton declared: "The threats we face today as Americans respect no nation's borders. Think of them: terrorism, the spread of weapons of mass destruction, organized crime, drug trafficking, ethnic and religious hatred, aggression by rogue states, environmental degradation." Which one of those things is not like the other?

That speech was the culmination of a movement first nudged along in the Clinton administration by Vice President Al Gore. Senior members of the administration - including Secretary of State Warren Christopher and CIA Director John Deutch - had been pushing the notion of environmentalism-as-national-security from the beginning, organizing an interagency conference on "Environmental Security and National Security" and creating an office in the CIA dubbed the "Central Intelligence Environmental Center." While resources were being cut elsewhere in the CIA, Deutch was diverting spy satellites to monitor "ecologically sensitive" sites.

I can’t find anything online to support Last’s charge that former Clinton administration CIA director John Deutch cut funds to monitor “ecologically sensitive” sites. If anyone has a link to a reputable news source on this, I’d appreciate it if you could send it along. Until that happens, though, I’ll assume this is another baseless conservative smear.

The '90s may have seemed like a period of relative calm, but as Rep. Pete Hoekstra, ranking Republican on the House Intelligence Committee, reminds us, the first attempt to bomb the World Trade Center was made in 1993, and Osama bin Laden issued his declaration of war against America in 1996. While these important events were taking place, Hoekstra writes, the CIA "ordered intelligence analysts and collectors to write about volcano eruptions, fish schools and air pollutions."

Oh, please. Let’s consider the following, shall we (even Last should be able to comprehend this)…

- In response to the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, al Qaeda associate Ramzi Yousef, the person chiefly accused in the attack, was later captured in Pakistan.

- Cruise missile attacks were ordered by Clinton at terrorist bases in the Sudan and Afghanistan in response to the U.S. Embassy bombings in 1998. Of the 21 terrorists accused in the bombings, two were killed, four were convicted and are serving life without parole, and two are being held at Guantanamo; the rest are being held in the U.K. or are still at large.

- Also, Clinton provided this explanation for the missile attacks in his interview in which he clashed with Fox’s Chris Wallace: “The entire military was against sending special forces into Afghanistan and refueling by helicopter and no one thought we could do it otherwise…We could not get the CIA and the FBI to certify that Al Qaeda was responsible (for the embassy bombings) while I was President.”

- Also, the investigation into the October 2000 bombing of the U.S.S. Cole could not be completed before the end of Clinton’s term in office.

Back to Last...

To be fair, the move to embed environmentalism in our national security policy predated Clinton. During a 1996 lecture on the history of the movement, Undersecretary of Defense Sherri Wasserman Goodman explained: As long ago as 1991, Gore "urged the intelligence community to create a task force to determine ways that intelligence assets could be tapped to support environmental research. The Environmental Task Force Gore helped create found that data collected by the intelligence community from satellites and other means can fill important information gaps for the environmental science community."

And before Gore, there was Democratic Sen. Sam Nunn, who, in a 1990 speech, urged the government to "harness some of the resources of the defense establishment . . . to confront the massive environmental problems facing our nation and the world today."

Again, this is not a question about whether we should study the environment. The issue is the wisdom of diverting finite intelligence resources from confrontation with a clear and present danger. The challenge for Republicans in 2008 is to persuade voters that, after Bush, they can rediscover the competence needed to protect America. For Democrats, the challenge is figuring out whether they think America needs more protection from foreign enemies or environmental degradation.

I already provided links above describing how our military has defined the national security threat posed by the climate crisis and how our politicians continue to obstruct on this, primarily the Repugs. I realize that it is too much for them to consider the global impact of our dereliction in addressing this urgent issue, but fortunately, at least one candidate for president has taken this into account.

And I realize the Inquirer could nominate anyone to write a column smearing a Democrat, but Last was as good (or bad) of a choice as any, I suppose. And based on this poll, it seems that he’s really doing nothing more than pandering to his Repug brethren at this point (among other things, this poll shows to me the power of propaganda such as that foisted by Last in that the number of Republicans who believe in man-made global warming has actually dropped according to the most recent poll results).

I’m not going to waste any more of my life wondering what planet these people are living on. We live on Earth, and to learn about what is going on in the real world, let me sneak in another plug here for “An Inconvenient Truth” out on DVD everywhere.