It must be great to be President. No matter how spectacularly wrong you are about why you support certain policies, the policies themselves are always correct. We saw this first with the Bush administration when he campaigned on the idea that the huge revenue surpluses the federal government was enjoying should be returned to the people in the form of tax cuts, after all, it’s their money. Well, as we all knew at the time, the economy was entering a tailspin and those surpluses were merely hypothetical. When the inevitable happened and the future surpluses went the way of the dinosaur, tax cuts became necessary in order to stimulate the flagging economy. Isn’t it cool how that works?

This week, we saw the same thing on the topic of global warming. Up until the EPA released a report this week saying that global warming was real and that it was our fault, President Bush simply refused to acknowledge that it was a problem. Hence, our energy policy was predicated on ignoring global warming. Confronted with this report from his own EPA, Bush simultaneously dismissed it as coming from the “bureaucracy” and saying that the problem is so severe that there’s nothing we can do about it anyway. Hence, our energy policy is predicated on ignoring global warming. Wouldn’t a rational, intellectually honest person say something like, “We’ll have to reexamine our energy policy in light of this report.” Then you could come out in six months and say, “Well, we looked at it and decided not to change a damn thing.” That would still be sleazy, but at least you could pretend to actually put some thought into the issues before deciding policy. I find it incredibly depressing that our President doesn’t even bother with that pretense.