Green vs. Red, White, and Blue

There are some who believe that America brought the 9/11 attacks of 2001 upon itself.  That we deserved to have thousands of civilians die that day.  The great Michael Moore is quoted suggesting that the 9/11 terrorists killed the wrong people:

“Many families have been devastated.  This just is not right.  They did not deserve to die.  If someone did this to get back at Bush, then they did so by killing thousands of people who DID NOT VOTE for him!  Boston, New York, DC, and the planes destination of California – these were places that voted AGAINST Bush!”

And Moore blames Bush for creating a sentiment of anti-Americanism worldwide in the first place:

“In just 8 months, Bush gets the whole world back to hating us again. He withdraws from the Kyoto agreement, walks us out of the Durban conference on racism, insists on restarting the arms race — you name it, and Baby Bush has blown it all.”

Which leads me to wonder…what would have happened had Gore won in 2000?  What would Gore’s response to the terrorist attacks on 9/11/2001 have been?  What issues would we be dealing with today?  What would our priorities be?

We can’t know for sure, but a good clue can be found at the Democratic Convention held a few weeks ago.  Sweetness & Light discusses the Dems’ efforts to run a green convention (Bold added by Sweetness & Light bloggers):

Democrats gear up for greener convention in Denver

By Stephanie Simon

June 30, 2008

DENVER – As the Mile High City gears up to host a Democratic bash for 50,000, organizers are discovering the perils of trying to stage a political spectacle that’s also politically correct.

Consider the fanny packs.

The host committee for the Democratic National Convention wanted 15,000 fanny packs for volunteers. But they had to be made of organic cotton. By unionized labor. In the USA.

Official merchandiser Bob DeMasse scoured the country. His weary conclusion: “That just doesn’t exist.”

Ditto for the baseball caps. “We have a union cap or an organic cap,” DeMasse says. “But we don’t have a union-organic offering.”

Much of the hand-wringing can be blamed on Denver’s Democratic mayor, John Hickenlooper, who challenged his party and his city to “make this the greenest convention in the history of the planet.”

Convention organizers hired the first-ever Director of Greening, longtime environmental activist Andrea Robinson. Her response to the mayor’s challenge: “That terrifies me!”  …

[S]he quickly modified the mayor’s goal: She’d supervise “the most sustainable political convention in modern American history.” …

To test whether celebratory balloons advertised as biodegradable actually will decompose, Robinson buried samples in a steaming compost heap. She hired an Official Carbon Adviser, who will measure the greenhouse-gas emissions of every placard, every plane trip, every appetizer prepared and every coffee cup tossed. The Democrats hope to pay penance for those emissions by investing in renewable energy projects.

Perhaps Robinson’s most audacious goal is to reuse, recycle or compost at least 85 percent of all waste generated during the convention.

To police the four-day event Aug. 25-28, she’s assembling (via paperless online signup) a trash brigade. Decked out in green shirts, 900 volunteers will hover at waste-disposal stations to make sure delegates put each scrap of trash in the proper bin. Lest a fork slip into the wrong container unnoticed, volunteers will paw through every bag before it is hauled away.

“That’s the only way to make sure it’s pure,” Robinson says…

But Matt Burns, a spokesman for the Republican convention, looks on with undisguised glee at some of the Democrats’ efforts — such as the “lean ‘n’ green” catering guidelines.

Among them: No fried food. And, on the theory that nutritious food is more vibrant, each meal should include “at least three of the following colors: red, green, yellow, blue/purple, and white.” (Garnishes don’t count.) At least 70 percent of ingredients should be organic or grown locally, to minimize emissions from fuel burned during transportation. “One would think,” says Burns, “that the Democrats in Denver have bigger fish to bake — they have ruled out frying already — than mandating color-coordinated pretzel platters.” …

“It’s the new patriotism,” Hickenlooper says. ..

But it’s almost inevitable that principles, politics and profit will conflict. To wit: Coors Brewing Co., in Golden, Colo., will donate biofuel made from beer waste to power the convention’s fleet of flex-fuel vehicles. A green star for the convention — but it has rankled die-hard liberals, who boycotted Coors in the 1960s and ’70s to protest hiring practices that they said discriminated against blacks, Latinos, women and gays. Heirs to the Coors fortune have long been active in conservative causes and Republican politics.

Convention officials say Coors is a good corporate citizen. And a Coors spokeswoman says the donation was a gesture of civic pride, not politics.

No matter, grumbles Anna Flynn, a longtime union member from Denver who objected to the donation. “Any way you put it, it’s still Coors,” she says…

Robinson, the greening director, says big showy conventions are part of the American political tradition, and thus worth a few emissions here and there. Also, she hates to be a killjoy.

True, she did try (unsuccessfully) to get bottled water banned from the convention hall. But remember those balloons? She checked the compost heap last week — and found them still intact. She has added more liquid to try to get them to degrade.

And if they don’t? “The balloons will be there,” she promises.

So will the fanny packs — made in the USA of undyed, organic fabric. DeMasse vows to get a union shop to print the logo, but he says the ink will be petroleum based. Unless, that is, he decides to get the logo embroidered — with biodegradable thread.

So maintaining a green convention is important enough for the Dems to test the balloons for biodegradability.  But look what didn’t get recycled and reused:

This is sickening.  The convention organizers hired volunteers to comb the trash bags for misplaced forks and couldn’t be bothered to salvage our nation’s symbol?  They went through incredible pains to ensure the fanny packs would be made of organic fabric and yet threw out perfectly useable American flags?  This literal trashing of the American flag is the sort of thing you might expect from a fringe protest, not from the organizers of the national convention of one of the two major political parties of the United States.   Here, we have a group of people, people who want to run the country, whose biggest priority is that the organic menu is color-coordinated, not that the American flag is displayed with respect and disposed of in a respectful manner, not that these perfectly useable flags are given back to community organizations, like Boy Scouts, Girl Scouts, schools, Veterans Affairs, graveyards, or the American Legion that could reuse them.

Even setting aside the blatant issue of patriotism, tossing 12,000 flags is a ridiculous waste.  It’s a waste of cotton and wood, a waste of landfill space, a waste of money buying all those flags for a one-time use, and a waste of opportunity in not selling the barely used flags, an item with obvious commercial value.

There are very good reasons to reduce our consumption of natural resources and energy.  But the global warming/climate change/green lobby today is a complete joke.  The NBC that dimmed the lights during Sunday Night Football for their Green is Universal initiative is the same NBC that ran the air conditioning outside during the Olympics.  The Al Gore who produced An Inconvenient Truth, a “documentary” exposing the perils of global warming is the same Al Gore whose mansion guzzled almost 221, 000 kilowatt-hours in 2006, more than 20 times the national average household energy use.

And all this, the leaders of environmental leadership being total energy hogs behind the camera, the biodegrable balloons ranking higher than the American flag that our veterans have sacrificed their lives to protect, all of this nonsense is already happening without Al Gore in the White House regulating our energy usage.

Really, I shudder to think of what Al Gore would have done in response if he were president on September 11, 2001.  Would he have reprimanded the terrorists for contributing to air pollution?  Or would he have thanked them for controlling the population?

So, on September 11, after I take a moment the victims of the World Trade Center attacks and their families, after I take a moment to thank the brave men and women defending our country, I have a brief moment of gratitude that Gore lost in 2000.

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Tags: Al Gore, American Flag, Democratic National Convention, Environment, Green, Michael Moore, September 11

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