Las Vegas Sun

March 28, 2024

Where I Stand — Brian Greenspun: Presidential meltdown

Brian Greenspun is editor of the Las Vegas Sun.

WEEKEND EDITION

June 11 - 12, 2005

OK, a war is one thing. And ruining a couple million lives of Nevadans ain't that big a deal, I suppose. But, heating up the world beyond its ability to get hot?

Now that is something people can get really upset about. All six billion of them!

I have not been the least bit surprised to see that President George W. Bush's poll numbers have slid downward in recent months because I predicted as much almost three years ago. Of course, I thought depressing Americans as much as the numbers would have resulted in a loss at the polls but there were some things I could not count on. Like who the candidates would be and how the war would be going. We all know how that election turned out.

But, there is one constant that you can always count on with American voters and that is that we are smart enough to eventually figure things out, however long it takes.

A story this week summed up all the reasons one needs to understand that the public has cooled to the leadership, policies and politics of President Bush. It has nothing to do with our desire to see him succeed -- his success is our success and only a fool would root against him -- but, rather, our desire to see this country move forward with responsible leadership. That is leadership that believes deep down that it is responsible to the people.

It has become increasingly clear to me that the constituency to which our president is beholden is a rather narrow, well-heeled one (I think I am supposed to be part of that group) and not the broadest number of Americans who expect leadership to act in their best interests all the time.

The story to which I refer is about a man named Philip Cooney, who is the chief of staff for the White House Council on Environmental Quality. That's the place where White House policy on environmental issues is developed.

It seems Cooney was doing a lot more than developing policy in that office. Turns out he was shaping the facts so that the policy he came up with for President Bush would fit that which Bush wanted to accomplish. I think most people would agree that that kind of activity is, as they say in Texas, bass ackwards.

What this guy did was take a draft report by the Climate Change Science Program and a report from the Subcommittee on Global Change Research and "fix" them so that what they ultimately said was not what the scientists who studied the issue actually wrote. It would be too simple to say that he subverted the meaning and intent of the scientists' findings, but he did very much the same thing. The shortened version of what he did would be called dishonest.

But it did attempt to accomplish what the Bush administration wanted and that was to soften and to obfuscate the findings of the scientific groups who were there to study the effects of global warming and report them to the American public. After all, if there is such a thing as global warming and if it is caused in large part by the coal we burn, the cars we drive and the power we consume, then this country is in the perfect position to lead the world by our example so that the polar ice caps will not melt and the air we breathe will not turn unbreathable.

Cooney was clever in the ways in which he turned a yes to a no, a black to a white and an up to a down. He simply made real factual findings -- which the entire scientific world knows to be true -- disappear using weasel words that allowed the president to hide behind a sea of the unknowable.

And when the media asked to question Cooney about why he changed the science to the politics, the answer came back that the Bush administration wouldn't "put Phil Cooney on the record. He's not a cleared spokesman."

I suppose the "cleared" spokesman is the same guy who told us about "weapons of mass destruction" in Iraq, "only the best science" at Yucca Mountain and "there's no such thing as global warming" on planet Earth.

Well, the people know better. They know a lie when they hear it, they know a load when they see it and they know that President Bush is no longer being straight with the American voters when he tells us something we know in our hearts and minds to be wrong. You can only trust a fellow to do the right thing for so long. After a while he needs to show us that he can walk like he talks.

That isn't happening anymore and that is why the president's poll numbers are sliding.

The worst part of the whole thing is not the poll numbers. It's the damned global warming. While President Bush is fiddling around with the facts, the Earth is burning.

One tiny degree at a time.

archive