May Have A Point, The Wrong Guy To Make It

If you stay in the Senate long enough and cast enough votes, it is inevitable that eventually you will vote on something one way, and then come out at a future date contradicting the position you made when casting that vote.

The other day, Senator Kit Bond of Missouri was debating Al Gore at a Senate hearing on the science of global warming when he pulled out the old "What about the children?" trick:

Sen. Bond unveiled a giant poster of a little girl whose family is so poor they can't afford to heat their home in the winter, then asked how Gore could conscionably ask that folks like this pay more for energy (since clean coal and renewables are both more expensive than plain old dirty coal).

Unfortnately, just 18 months ago, Senator Bond voted against the Low-Income Home Energy Assistance Program, which would have provided financial assistance to "a little girl whose family is so poor they can't afford to heat their home in the winter".

Now I know that this is the old trick of attacking the messenger and ignoring the message, but that's politics. I personally don't have an answer for Senator Bond. Pretty much everything new and improved is more expensive than the old... even for poor people. That's life. Just because something better is more expensive doesn't mean we take a pass on advancing our ways of doing things. If that was the case, we would still be watching 8 channels of programming on 20-inch black and white TVs. (And don't tell me poor people haven't managed to shoulder that new cost.)

I might make a suggestion for the Senator though: Next time, he might consider voting to take 0.0001% of the $1 trillion that the U.S. Government spends every year, and using it to help poor families heat their homes, instead of pointing an accusatory finger at a guy who is just trying to keep God's Green Earth clean and healthy. I'm generally not keen on taxing and spending, and believe that all mankind should handle the work and expense of keeping the environment clean instead of relying on the government to do it, but it seems to me that some expenses are more worthwhile than others.

By the way Mr. Gore: The next time a Senator pulls the cheap brainless stunt of putting up the picture of a sad-faced child and saying, "Do you want this poor child from Pittsburgh to freeze?" put up your own picture of a sad-faced child and say, "Do you want this poor child from Fiji to drown?"

(Hat tip to Americablog.)