No, that's not quite what Wyoming Senator John Barrasso proudly announced this week. The actual quote is "For me, coal is freedom." Coal is only partly made up of antimony -- the rest is mercury, arsenic, selenium, iron, nickel, sulfur, aluminum, copper, lithium, hydrogen, manganese, magnesium, lead, uranium, thorium, radium, and of course carbon. (Partial list.)
To equate "freedom" with a mineralized conglomerate of fossilized ferns is, quite simply, silly. Yes, there is a lot of coal in Barrasso's state of Wyoming. But I do not expect to hear Wisconsin Senator Herbert Kohl proclaim that "cheese is freedom," nor to hear my own Senator, Dianne Feinstein, declare that it is Pinot noir that makes America "the land of the free." Even North Carolina's Jesse Helms, with whom I almost never agree, refrained from proclaiming that it was "life, liberty and the pursuit of tobacco" that sparked the American Revolution.
If coal made a country free, Poland and Germany would not have suffered as they did in the twentieth century -- both had an abundance.
But the past, even the very recent past, is a foreign country. They did things differently back then. You have to wonder whether elected officials in Washington these days actually listen to what they are saying. Are the reporters who dutifully pass these gems on popping some extreme form of steroids that blocks them from asking obvious questions like, "Do you really mean that, Senator? Could you explain why coal is freedom?"
This was not the only absurdity Barrasso managed to get covered this week. He also proclaimed that President Obama's nominee for Secretary of Commerce, John Bryson, was unqualified because he was "an environmental extremist."
Barrasso's main complaint against Bryson, who formerly led Edison International, an electrical generating firm with a market capitalization in excess of $12 billion, is that he is not "an economic leader." Barrasso complains that Bryson supported energy and climate legislation, which did not pass the U.S. Senate -- even though back in the fall of 2007, when Barrasso first voted on such cap-and-trade legislation, it was supported by Republican presidential nominee to-be John McCain. Barrasso himself said that the need to reduce carbon emissions was becoming widely recognized, and that Wyoming needed to be at the center of new technologies. "The writing is on the wall..." No one reminded him of that history this week.
But the complete disconnect between words and meaning which afflicts Washington is spreading, like most plagues. A bit to the north, in New Jersey, Governor Chris Christie declared that he was going to abandon the state's highly successful commitment to solar and renewable power, and replace it with something "more realistic."
Currently New Jersey is aiming to get 30 percent of its electricity from the sun and wind by 2021. Christie wants to cut that back to 22.5 percent. In fact, New Jersey is on track to exceed the 30 percent goal. What is more "realistic" than something you are already achieving? Well, in Christie's case, it is new nuclear power plants, a technology that no company in New Jersey has expressed the slightest interest or capacity in undertaking. And there is absolutely no possibility that anyone, under any circumstances, could build a new nuclear power plant in New Jersey by 2021, however eager they might be to do so. It just can't happen. So the impossible is to take the place of the already-occurring, dressing itself up as hard-headed business realism.
I don't mean to beat up on Barrasso and Christie -- they are simply doing their little bit to lower the already abysmal standards of public debate in our politics. They have lots of role models in both parties. The real question is why we put up with it.