During his first days in the White House, Ronald Reagan tore down the solar energy panels that President Carter had put on the roof. According to a Los Angeles Times article (http://www.calendarlive.com/books/cl-na-book7jan07.story) about a forthcoming book by former Bush speechwriter David Frum, Bush the Younger continues this great tradition, calling environmentalists "Green-green lima beans."

We also learn from the book, however, that Bush is something of a Lima Bean himself."Finishing a practice session before a speech one day, he (Bush) pointed to a table lamp, and demanded: 'Do you think it's going to occur to anybody to turn that lamp off when we leave the room?' He flicked it off himself.

"It vexed him to look out the windows of the White House family quarters before sunrise and see the Executive Office Building bright with lights that had been carelessly left burning overnight,' Frum writes.But the Vision Thing doesn't seem to have been a required course at Yale, and thus the next logical step seems to have been beyond the president's conceptual reach: Might all those wasteful light bulbs possibly be linked to things like SUVs and nonrenewable energy sources and Saudi Arabia?

Of course not. The idea would strike the Cowpoke from Greenwich not as improbable, or even impossible, but as insane.

Side note: Frum is apparently the intellectual parent of the term "Axis of Evil (http://slate.msn.com/id/2062571/)" language which has been so helpful in averting a crisis with North Korea. He insists that his suggestion was “Axis of Hatred” and the president made the change in keeping with his religious and moral beliefs.

:m: Peace.