Bad Guys

 It would be an oversimplification to suggest that Republicans don't care for the environment. Much in the same way it would be unfair to say that George W. Bush doesn't like black people. He seems to get along with Michelle Obama just fine. Interestingly, it was Kanye West who first suggested that George W. Bush doesn't care about black people. Spin that big wheel just a little harder and you might wonder if it wasn't Kanye who doesn't care about black people. We have a pretty clear picture of how he feels about Jewish people. His alignment with the red baseball cap crowd probably says it all. 

But back to the environment. It was a Republican president, one Richard Milhouse Nixon, who first established the Environmental Protection Agency way back in 1970. For the past fifty-five years, there has been a number of successes and a few failures by this governmental agency assigned to keep our planet from turning into that scary scene we all saw Iron Eyes Cody witness: Keep America Beautiful. 

Beautiful would be nice, but these days I believe it would be nice to keep America off life support. 

This past week the newly installed Director of the EPA Lee Zeldin announced that“a dagger through the heart of climate-change religion” had been placed by the Second Trumpreich after the rollback of a number of environmental regulations. Rather than ending the commercial with a single tear, Iron Eyes Cody might next be renamed "Iron Lung" Cody after having water and air pollution limits repealed as well as the mandatory reporting of greenhouse gas emissions. The MAGAts in charge have declared that the 2009 legal decision that says greenhouse gases like carbon dioxide and methane are warming the Earth and that warming presents a threat to public health and welfare is the problem. Not the solution. 

Remember when Sarah Palin was the creepy outlier with her cry, "Drill Baby, Drill?" That's where we find ourselves as Project 2025 rolls on through, leaving behind it images of a devastated planet, like what happened in Ferngully, or the "live-action" remake Avatar. But this isn't science fiction. It's not a dystopian fever dream. It's what is happening to the Earth while Nero the adjudicated rapist fiddles. 

Which brings to mind yet another movie reference: "Some men just want to watch the world burn." These were the words Alfred used to describe The Joker to Bruce Wayne. Just to be clear, The Joker is the bad guy in this scenario. Those who just want to watch the world burn are the bad guys. Which wouldn't be such an awful thing if there was a Batman out there to bring justice to Gotham City. If we had the luxury of time. 

We don't. 

We are running out of time. And these Jokers are literally stepping on the gas.