There comes a time when deceit and defiance must be seen for what they are. At that point, a gathering danger must be directly confronted. - Dick Cheney
The most alarming of all man's assaults upon the environment is the contamination of air, earth, rivers, and sea with dangerous and even lethal materials. - Rachel Carson
The forty year anti-environmentalist crusade of former Vice President Dick Cheney is about to face a calling. Not, as most of the Arab world and liberal Hollywood irony peddlers would prefer, in a metaphoric slog up the stairs to a contemporary gallows. He has been wrong his entire career and he has waged literal and deliberate war to force his wrongness upon the world. The Cheney era is going to end starting this season in a slow global shaming on a plane unseen since Aaron Burr changed his name and got kicked out of England.
Tomorrow, June 2nd 2014, Mr Cheney will probably stand the bully pulpit to scare the children through one last news cycle in his long campaign for American oil royalism. He is going to do it by the rare instance of loosing a battle. Sadly for Mr Cheney his personal war on behalf of the tyrannical and unregulated burnfuel industry has been fought on the wrong side of moral history. In this regard tomorrow's blockbuster announcement by the EPA will instantly become a historical monument for our better destiny.
The old political climate Mr. Cheney was hired to police a few decades ago by Texas Oil has obviously changed. The storms are now fiercer, more personal, more damaging and the vitriolic winds so much hotter. Cheney and his boys can no longer endure the new weather they helped create.
It occurs to this former Wyoming Cowboy that Mr. Cheney is reminiscent of a certain 19th century Wyoming hired gun. Because he will be outlived in lore and sentiment by the renegade outliers he worked so hard to vanquish. Alas, Tom Horn, late of the Cheyenne gallows and interred since 1903 in a Boulder, Colorado Cemetery was a tough and accomplished gunsel most people have probably never heard of. Meanwhile "The Boy Who Yawns" and the people he led to defend against Mr. Horn remain in our classrooms as fabled heroes. More on him below. But first:
In about nine hours the (United States) Environmental Protection Agency is going to stun the world by doing three things. The first one, for which the Secret Service seems to expect former Mitt Romney adviser and current Obama appointed EPA Administrator Gina Mccarthy will receive the most death threats of any sitting non-military cabinet official in U.S. history, is to embrace as policy the stupidly obvious reality that unchecked carbon emissions are very, very bad for the evolved branch of life on earth that includes human beings, rats and politicians.
The Second, a byproduct of the first, is to ensure that the re-enraged GOP handily wins both houses of Congress next fall. (At a tangent, if winning the Senate empowers the worst congress in history to reload their bongs with more bat guano it will probably give Bill-Jeff Clinton an even better chance to become the first person in American history introduced at Lincoln Center as "President-The-First-Gentleman Clinton".)
Midnight speculation aside, this is about to become one of the loudest political seasons since Bush/Cheney used treasonous false justifications to invade the largest oil field in the Mid East. We had a little break after the re-election dust-up didn't we?
Quiet time is over.
Too bad then that Politics, like the weather, is getting harder to enjoy. Maybe we can still reverse the trend for both if we regulate the worst toxic gas emitters. In any case, it will be interesting to see Cheney try to stay involved this year. Like Tom Horn, Dick Cheney was a good rider but arrogant to a fault. Now the old rifleman might see the end of his hydro-fractured political destiny before this next hottest-summer-in-recorded-history unfolds.
Dick will likely campaign here and there. Maybe he will even show up in tornado alley in Oklahoma this fall and stop to take a few pictures with tourists down the road from the place they kept that old Apache war chief Tom Horn chased down. The one who yawns.
The one whose name so many parachute soldiers called out as they went through the door before dawn 70 years ago come Friday to save an imperiled continent. Whose name was used as the code for killing Osama Bin Laden and ending all the threat that he represented. And if those causes seemed just and serious enough for us to kill and send our children to be killed, then how can we deny that putting a few over-designed sponges into our coal burning smokestacks to protect and defend the entire human race is any less worthy of America's trembling ability to do mighty things? It sure seems easier and less expensive than invading Iraq was. Either time.
Well, this is a scattered note and it is so late here that it is early now. So I'll let you go with my apology for once again dipping my quill in the weird ink and asking anyone sober to read it.
Oh, but I almost forgot The Third thing:
To quote a prominent Japanese politician from the day Sarah Palin lost her wildcat bid to replace Dick Cheney as V.P.: Tomorrow the EPA will " .. show the world that The United States of America is still the country we thought it was".
And not for nothing, but from someone who spent yesterday digging 45 and 50 million year old fossils out of the Green River Oil Shale in the shadow of one of the largest coal fired generating stations in Wyoming and the West, it is a beautiful spring out there but sometimes the big noise can be comforting when you
Ride for the High Country.