Where is the mouse? This lion is in need of help. ;)
***....The same group of activists was also tailing the other contenders in 2000, without the same result. When Bush personnel wouldn't let them into his tightly scripted events, for instance, they stood outside chanting, "Houston: We have a problem." But it clearly didn't do much good.
Perhaps we're asking the question the wrong way around. It's possible that there's nothing so odd about John McCain, no need to explain his conversion as some kind of miracle. In his belief that global warming is a serious problem, and in his desire to do something about it, he's in agreement with the vast majority of American voters, the legislators of every other industrialized country, and virtually every climatologist on planet Earth. (His proposed legislation, in fact, is far weaker than the weakest laws of the European nations.) Maybe the better question is: How did the other Republicans in Washington get so…odd? How did the party of T.R. become so anti-environmental?
Consider, for instance, Senator James Inhofe, the Oklahoma Republican who chairs the Committee on Environment and Public Works. He didn't just vote against McCain-Lieberman -- he took to the floor during the debate over the bill to describe global warming as "the greatest hoax ever perpetrated on the American people." Shortly thereafter, he led an unofficial delegation of eight Republican congressmen to talks in Milan on ratification of the Kyoto Protocol. Though President Bush had long since pulled the United States out of the agreement, Inhofe still thought it was important to make clear to the Europeans "that we are not going to ratify Kyoto." Indeed, he lectured them on his collection of scientific "evidence" disproving climate change -- a threadbare assortment of discredited studies that fly in the face of the mountain of peer-reviewed evidence assembled in the last decade, not to mention the observable trends gaining momentum across the planet (glacial systems in rapid retreat, Arctic ice thinning precipitously, all 10 of the warmest years on record in the last two decades). For some reason, the Europeans were not impressed -- perhaps because they still remembered last summer's record heat wave, which baked to death more than 10,000 residents of France and Belgium. "They don't want to listen," Inhofe told nationally syndicated columnist James Glassman. "They were zombies." ....***