Op-Ed Columnist: Masters of Deception
January 16, 2004 By BOB HERBERT It was snowing and the temperature was headed toward single digits when I left the hotel on Park Avenue Wednesday night. A doorman flagged a cab and I climbed in. I'd just finished an interview with Al Gore and it was hard to shake the melancholy feeling that the man who should be president was spending a stormy night in Midtown Manhattan while the momentous world events he should be shaping were careering in all sorts of dangerous directions. The former vice president was in town to give a speech on the Bush administration's environmental policies, which he basically described as an exercise in wholesale environmental destruction. Instead of caving in to such special interests as the coal, oil and chemical industries (as the administration has done), Mr. Gore said that the U.S. should be leading the effort to rein in pollution and get control of the potentially devastating problem of global warming. During the interview, he spoke passionately about the environment and opened his laptop computer to give what amounted to a spontaneous seminar on global warming. He noted that most of the glaciers in the world are melting at an alarming rate and added wryly, "Glaciers don't give a damn about politics. They just reflect reality." The environmental speech, which he delivered at the Beacon Theater on the Upper West Side yesterday afternoon, is the latest in a series of formal critiques of the administration that Mr. Gore has delivered in recent months. Previous subjects have been national security, economic policy and civil liberties. The theater, including the balcony, was packed. People had waited in a long line in the cold and snow to pass through metal detectors and be allowed in. The crowd, enthusiastic from the very beginning, included families with small children, elderly men and women and students. When Mr. Gore strode onto the stage he was greeted with a long standing ovation. At one point, he told his audience: "In preparing this series of speeches, I have noticed a troubling pattern that characterizes the Bush-Cheney administration's approach to almost all issues. In almost every policy area, the administration's consistent goal has been to eliminate any constraints on their exercise of raw power, whether by law, regulation, alliance or treaty. And in the process, they have in each case caused America to be seen by the other nations of the world as showing disdain for the international community." Amid cheers, he made it clear that the broad interests of the American public are consistently betrayed by the policies and practices of President Bush and his administration. "They devise their policies with as much secrecy as possible," he said, "and in close cooperation with the most powerful special interests that have a monetary stake in what happens. In each case, the public interest is not only ignored, but actively undermined. In each case, they devote considerable attention to a clever strategy of deception that appears designed to prevent the American people from discerning what it is they are actually doing. "Indeed, they often use Orwellian language to disguise their true purposes. For example, a policy that opens national forests to destructive logging of old-growth trees is labeled Healthy Forest Initiative. A policy that vastly increases the amount of pollution that can be dumped into the air is called the Clear Skies Initiative." Our history has shown that we can and should be better than this. Mr. Gore leaned forward during Wednesday night's interview and ticked off some of the nation's greatest successes - the simultaneous victories in Europe and the Pacific during World War II, the Marshall Plan, the eradication of polio, the civil rights movement, the space program and the victory over Communism in the cold war. There is no reason to expect less, he said, as the country faces its biggest challenges today. The fates dealt Mr. Gore and the United States a weird hand in 2000. He got the most votes but the other guy became president. And the country, its Treasury looted and its most pressing needs deliberately ignored, has been rolling backward ever since. "This is insanity," said Mr. Gore, referring to the administration's handling of the environment. But his speech made it clear that he could just as easily have applied that sentiment to the full range of Bush-Cheney policies. History will not be kind to the chicanery that passes for governing in the Bush II administration. http://www.nytimes.com/2004/01/16/opinion/16HERB.html?ex=1075282601&ei=1&en=fdb2b227e617d180 --------------------------------- Get Home Delivery of The New York Times Newspaper. Imagine reading The New York Times any time & anywhere you like! Leisurely catch up on events & expand your horizons. 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