Finally, Something the Righties and Lefties All Agree On: McCain Needs to Stop this Environment Crap

It’s not often that liberals and conservatives strongly agree on a subject, even if they have wildly differing reasons for doing so. But after John McCain debuted a line of eco-friendly merchandise on his official website, things heated up all over the blogosphere. McCain’s got people on both sides of the political fence all riled up right now, and it will be interesting to see what it does to his campaign.

When the presumptive Republican presidential nominee started making claims about what he would do as President to help the environment, many of us liberals weren’t pleased. To anyone who wonders why we’d be anything less than thrilled about the fact that the man on the other side of the ring is professing his supposed commitment to the environment, Energy Smart sums up the general sentiment:

There are some things that fall beyond satire.

Who do they think they’re kidding? Rebranding McCain as Mr. Environment? Rebranding the Republican Party as the Eco-Friendly choice? The McCain campaign must have a real disdain for the intellect of the American voting public.

While John McCain at least has a foot in reality, as he recognizes that Global Warming is real (unlike the majority of the Republican Party, which continues to reject reality), his “solutions” remained half-baked, half-measures.

Now that McCain has introduced a line of eco-friendly gear on his website, he’s being hit even harder with criticism. After his adviser Kevin Hassett wrote an op-ed opposing the designation of polar bears as endangered because of what it would mean for oil drilling in Alaska, Gristmill wonders,

If McCain’s advisers are already pushing for Bush-administration-style policies on issues like the polar bear, how credible are his claims this week that he’s not Bush when it comes to the environment? All the eco-swag in the world can’t make up for policies that continue to prioritize industry interests over the planet.

Another reason why Democrats and other liberals aren’t happy about McCain’s pandering is the fact that his record shows that he’s all talk and no action on environment. The Democratic Party spells it out here.

Commenters on blogs like the New York Times’ ‘The Caucus’ point out the hypocrisy:

“When he comes out with “green” flip flops I might be able to stop laughing long enough to forget his voting record on the environment! NOT! – Posted by JanK”

“WOW! Now I sure want to vote for John McCain! He is so eco-friendly making cotton bags to shops with while riding around in his wifes private jet!!!! — Posted by Shawn”

And then, there’s the conservative reaction.

I usually stay away from conservative media for a reason: reading just a few lines of their bullshit makes me start to feel like a homicidal maniac. I literally feel my blood pressure rising. I start to get a crazy look in my eye. It’s not good. But as the posts started streaming in from right-wing blogs about the McCain campaign’s sudden focus on the environment, I couldn’t ignore them.

Conservatives are pissed. Most of them weren’t crazy about McCain to begin with, but this whole environmentalism thing has their panties in a wad like never before. The Business and Media Institute quotes Rush Limbaugh:

“The troubling thing here, Senator McCain, is I’m mapping out plans here to try to persuade Republicans to eventually cross over to vote for you and this is not making it any easier,” conservative radio talk show host Rush Limbaugh said on his May 12 show. “At some point Republicans are going to have to decide whether to cross the aisle and vote for McCain. Clearly, he’s rolling the dice in thinking that the ‘green’ community and the independents and the yutes out there will buy into this global warming business and think he’s different than the average conservative Republican and that will stand him in good stead.”

Heidi Harris, a radio talk show host in Las Vegas, isn’t happy about it either. She rails incredulously, with her Midwestern Mom hair quivering as she speaks, about how the U.S. might as well not even try to cap their emissions since businesses will just send their factories off to China. Let’s not even go there, because that’s a whole different topic. The point is, she wants you all to know how absolutely disgusted she is as a conservative that John McCain is focused on climate change. Watch the video on the Business and Media Institute website and you’ll see what I mean.

Andy Aplikowski of True North needed to knock a few back to deal with the news that McCain is selling ‘eco-friendly merchandise’ on his official website.

Cease and desist on all this Global Warming BS that warms the heart of Al Gore. If we can just stop the Republican officer holders and politicians from speaking in support of it we could easily cut half the so-called human caused global warming gases being emitted from the steaming piles of rhetoric they spew daily in the hopes of pandering for votes based on junk science funded by anti-American billionaires who loathe everything the Republican party is supposed to stand for.

And finally, I leave you with a quote that made me spit my coffee all over my laptop screen. Thank you, Andy Aplikowski, for this unintentional bit of much-needed humor on this dreary day:

Sticking your finger in the eye of conservatives is never a good idea if you are the Republican candidate for President, but waging an all out war on capitalism and promoting the junk science designed to end the American way of life [emphasis mine] is a colossal electoral failure waiting to happen.

Priceless.

Photo credit: Flickr user soggydan

In Which We Throw Much Link Love to Our #1 Commenter Roy

We’re just a week or so away from launching our new and improved site design and actually starting to marketing this beotch to the rest of the net. For the past two months or so we’ve been tinkering with things behind the scene, getting our voice worked out, finding good writers to help us bring great content to the site, and everything besides actually driving page views.

When our new design is up and running we’ll turn on the traffic machine and expect a veritable flood of new readers, linkers, and commenters. But all this time it’s been pretty lonely. Lonely, except for our #1 (and only regular) commenter Roy. Before things get crowded around here I wanted to give him a big thanks for participating and encourage all our other handful of regular readers to go visit his site All Your Green.

Thanks Roy! We appreciate you taking the time to let us know what you think about our writing.

Link [All Your Green]

EarthFirst Blog Week in Review: February 4th- 8th

It’s been a good first week of public beta style pre-launch. We’re fast at work on a custom design blog template for our officially official launch in the next month or two and cranking away at the publishing side o’ things in the process. Here’s what we put up last week…

Monday February 4

Hello World! Welcome to EarthFirst.com, the site that’s NOT Earth First!

The Downside of Water Conservation: More Expensive H2O, Slashed Revenues

Wednesday February 6
Scientists Bending Nature to Build a Tear-Free Onion

Just When You Thought it Was Safe to Swim with the Dolphins…

The Cadillac Escalade Hybrid is Big Pile of Greenwashed Steel

The Pacific Ocean Gyre: A Huge Swirling Mass of Sadness (and Plastic)

Mmmmm…. Kraft Anti-Intestinal Worm Mac & Cheese

New York City Honors Winning Giants by Showering Tons of Litter on Them

National Academy of Sciences: Digital Media is Turning Us Into Slugs

Thursday February 7
The Department of the Interior Arrests a Protesting Greenpeace Polar Bear

Bad News Planeteers, Captain Planet Will NOT Be Going Live Action

A Green Wal-Mart? Not So Fast…

Friday February 8
Dumpster Diving Dude Lives Off Society’s Detritus

Honest Tea Founder Lays Out Some Honesty- Why They Sold (Out) to Coke

Evil Incarnate, Japanese Whalers Slaughter Mother Whale and Her Calf for “Scientific Research”

Hello World! Welcome to EarthFirst.com, the site that’s NOT Earth First!

Welcome to EarthFirst.com. Let me start off by telling you who we’re not. We are NOT Earth First!, the radical environmental activists fond of sitting in trees, screaming in the woods, and damning The Man. We’re EarthFirst.com, a bunch of snarky green entrepreneurs and video producers dedicated to cutting through the eco-fluff in search of the heart of the new green movement. We have our radar set for greenwash and are not afraid to call out the jerkasses slowing down the fight against the old way of doing things.

I’m Shea Gunther, the newly hired VP of Content and head of this here blog. I’ll be doing most of the writing and working with the writers that we bring on board to help me out. I’ve been bouncing around the green blogosphere for the past few years and couldn’t be more excited about working with the rest of the good folks here at EarthFirst.

We’ll be blogging here for the next few months while we get all our ducks in a row with our plans to produce daily high quality green video content.

I love getting comments and tips from readers, so zip me an email at shea@earthfirst.com if you have anything good. If you have anything bad send it to ICouldGiveABleep@hotmail.com.

Rock on rockstars.