Give Bush his little anti-same-sex marriage crusade. It's being overwhelmed by two coasts, it's not going anywhere and it's not nearly as urgent as everyone's making it out to be. You say we need issues to call our own? Let's start here.
Bleak Forecast
By Arianna Huffington, AlterNet
February 25, 2004
If he's smart enough to use it, the Democratic nominee may have just been handed the perfect cudgel with which to pummel President Bush – and cripple Karl Rove's attempts to position his man as America's go-to guy on national security.
The weapon in question is a new report on the grave and gathering threat posed by global climate change – and the potentially cataclysmic consequences of the Bush administration's obstinately ignorant approach to global warming.
And the thing that makes the report so frightening – and the prospective bludgeon so crushing – is that it wasn't authored by some crunchy granola think tank or a band of tree-hugging EarthFirsters, but by the U.S. Department of Defense.
That's right, the Pentagon – Rummy's playpen. In fact, the report, which was slipped to the press earlier this month after being kept under wraps by the White House for four months, was commissioned by Andrew Marshall, a legendary DOD figure, nicknamed "Yoda" for his sagacity. As head of the Pentagon's secretive Office of Net Assessment, Marshall has offered national security assessments to every president since Richard Nixon.
And this latest assessment pegs climate change as a far greater danger than even the scourge of international terrorism.
