An Inconvenient Moron

After reading this, I'm beginning to believe Laurie David is a conservative plant, an agent of Karl Rove sent to discredit the entire environmental movement. The unintentional hilarity is not the article, which is yet another attempt to canonize David's "activism" while completely ignoring the contradiction between her words and her lifestyle.

The true funny comes after the article, with an excerpt from David's book - "Stop Global Warming: The Solution is You." Presumably, by "you" she means you. Not her and her Hollywood friends - you beer-swilling, country music listening, NASCAR watching vermin in flyover (in a private jet!) country.

After all, she cares more than you do.

I hated those first few months of motherhood. The baby had colic, Larry was on a soundstage seven days a week, my career was on hold-all of my friends worked-I had no one to talk to. I was isolated and scared. I spent a lot of time walking around the neighborhood, pushing a stroller. I started noticing an enormous amount of SUVs on the street. Everyone was driving them. I frequented a local bookstore and picked up a book called High and Mighty by Keith Bradsher of The New York Times. It was about the proliferation of SUVs and how they were really harming America. It explained that our fuel-economy standards were plunging because of a loophole in the law that classified SUVs as trucks, thereby allowing them to have lower mileage standards than regular cars-fewer miles per gallon and double the carbon-dioxide emissions. So, every time you drove somewhere, to the store, the school, the freeway, you were now all of a sudden doubling your personal CO2 pollution. I panicked, because everyone I knew was driving them. I had had other lightbulb moments in my life-like the first time I tasted good wine and then couldn't drink the cheap stuff any more; or the moment that I learned that bald men make better lovers, and never dated a man with hair again. But this was different. This awareness landed with a thud on my shoulders. And with awareness comes responsibility.

After reading this, awareness has landed like a thud on my shoulders - Laurie David is a hypocritical simpleton and an elitist gasbag.

And with awareness comes responsibility.

David goes on to describe how her environmental awareness was furthered through completely one-sided education.

After connecting the dots when I became a mom, I made it my job to educate myself about the environment and global warming. I read everything on the subject I could get my hands on: books and articles by reporter Mark Hertsgaard (Earth Odyssey); environmentalist Bill McKibben (The End of Nature); Pulitzer Prize-winning writer Ross Gelbspan (Boiling Point); Todd Wilkinson (Science under Siege); and Al Gore (Earth in the Balance). I joined the board of the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC), the most effective environmental group in the country. And through them, I met Robert F. Kennedy Jr., NRDC's senior attorney. Hearing him describe environmental problems as the civil rights issue of our time resonated so deeply with me that it was at that very moment that I decided to devote everything I had to the cause — to become a serious full-timer.

Well, she's not a real stickler for the facts, so somehow I doubt it.

I woke up the morning after the election, November 3, and cried for three straight days. I couldn't stop. Not because my candidate lost, which he had, but because of what it meant for the solutions to global warming. We had just reelected a president who surrounds himself with advisors and staff culled from the oil and auto industries, two giants fighting change at all costs. In fact, the president's first act in office in 2001 was to renege on his promise to regulate CO2 as a pollutant. Two months later, he shocked the world by removing the United States from the Kyoto Protocol, an agreement that was the result of thousands of hours of work, endless meetings, difficult negotiations-basically blood, sweat, and tears-on the part of 160 countries, including the United States.

Laurie David is a liar.

Wait...that wasn't nearly strong enough. Let me try again.

Laurie David is a liar, a cheap propagandist and a fraud who is doing more damage to the environmental cause with her insipid "look at me" activism than an army of skeptics could even hope to achieve.

Ahhh...that's the stuff.

But wait...there's more. David realized she needed a Republican to give some bipartisan flavor to her quest.

Guess who she picked. No really, guess.

The next step was to find a prominent Republican to help launch the Virtual March, because, as we all know, this issue is not political, it is moral. If global warming became associated with just one political party, we would never get to where we need to go. The obvious first stop was John McCain, who has been a long-time outspoken leader on global warming. And I have to say that it was my stature as an NRDC trustee that got me into his Senate office. (Okay, maybe he was a Curb Your Enthusiasm fan, too, and Seinfeld, well, that certainly didn't hurt — I am the first to use the proverbial "wife of" when needed. Another life lesson: use what you've got.) But still, he knew I had the support of the most powerful and respected environmental group in the world, and that goes a long way when you are knocking on doors in Washington. In his office, on the spot, he said to me, "Let's get marching."

John McCain - bipartisan beard for environmental frauds. Won't that look good in a campaign commercial? I know McCain values his Maverick™ status, but he really could, and should, have known better than to hitch his star to the snake-oil peddling David.

Usually, at this point in an essay, it would be tempting to write "I'm sure David means well, but..." I'm not going to do that. David's intentions are what are so disturbing here. She's shown that she has no intention whatsoever of giving up her lifestyle - she is going to continue living just as she is, carbon footprint be damned.

Her intentions are clear - she believes that what the U.S. needs to do to reduce our carbon dioxide emissions is to control the proles - what cars we drive, how we heat our houses and provide power to our houses - all of that has to change. As for her? She's got good intentions-offsets that allow her to basically live as she wishes, so long as she continues being a suffering jeremiah to the masses, preaching what is increasingly becoming a message of fire and brimstone.

For us, I mean.

Mmmm...cake.

posted by Slublog at 10:54 AM

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