Is this the best they can do?

I am going back in time to illustrate a point, a point which some right-wing commentators readily admit. There is very little that can be done to defend the Bush record on the environment. It is instructive to read Robert Kennedy Jr.'s 2003 piece in Rolling Stone and then read a critique of it by Jonathan Adler in National Review. While Adler points out what I must admit are a few puzzling errors in Kennedy's piece, he tries to use those errors--sometimes they are the result of hyperbole--to say the whole thing is wrong. He does this without actually discrediting any of the stories which Kennedy relates about how the administration has behaved. Of course, Adler is writing for the faithful who don't want to know the truth; they just want their own fantasies reinforced. But, his failure to dent Kennedy's narrative of the Bush administration's environmental crimes show that the administration is quite vulnerable on this issue, if only the public could be made aware of just how bad the damage is.

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