G W Bush, environmental visionary

Cuz now, after he’s been obstructing national and international efforts to mitigate climate change for years, shirking responsibility for reducing the emissions in the number one greenhouse gas producing nation (per capita, about 4x what China produces), he’s willing to encourage his successor (please please please be Obama) to take some steps to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

Now, I understand that implementing a sustainable energy policy will be hard, and there are those who think that the growing pains will be economically painful.  Especially if you make most of your money investing in  greenhouse gas emitting fuels, I suppose.  So of course, Bush wouldn’t have wanted to be associated with that.  But I’m willing to concede that he meant well all this time, and just wanted to check the figures himself before really endorsing a climate change policy.  And now that his feet will be off the fire, he’s willing to put someone else’s there.  Because that’s just the kinda guy he’s always been.  Uhm, nice and well meaning, I mean, not irresponsible and habitually blameless.

Well, since Bush woulda vetoed it…

NPR reports today, July 9, 2008, the day Congress overruled the 4th amendment, that Bush would have vetoed the FISA update bill if it didn’t include the telecom amnesty provision.  So I guess Congress’s hands were tied.  Except that, what NPR didn’t mention, was that we don’t need the stinking FISA update that was being offered at all.  So the veto “threat” shouldn’t have carried any weight.  Civil libertarians would have been perfectly happy with a veto, and national securitarians (or whomever) would have barely missed the FISA revisions.  Well, they have a bit less work to do now when setting up wiretaps.  Namely, they don’t have to get warrants as often.  And the warrants don’t have to actually be based on anything.  But FISA warrants weren’t hard to get anyway.  Of course, if you really want to use the government’s wiretapping authority to perform illicit, illegal wiretaps on intranational US communications, that’s now much easier to do.  So there’s that, if you’re into that sort of thing.  None of which do I recall NPR mentioning in the past few weeks.

Stellar reporting job, NPR.  Thanks for that.  Very much.  Now go fuck yourselves.