Good Question

Jay Nordlinger:

The other day, I was engaged in one of life’s most pleasurable activities: I was reading an article by Mark Steyn. He related a story about Bob Dole, and his attachment to the congressional world.

One day, the senator was visiting a school, and a little girl asked him about acid rain: What did he plan to do about it? Dole replied, “That bill’s in markup.”

But forget Bob Dole: That story got me to thinking, What happened to acid rain? I mean, it was on the cover of Time magazine about 100 times. It was the concern of the century, the environmental crime of the century. Schoolteachers everywhere told their kiddies that Ronald Reagan and the Republicans were climbing into the sky to create that rotten rain. At a minimum, they were indifferent to it.

And then . . . silence. No Time magazine cover. No Democratic talking point. The enviro crowd just moved on to something else (chiefly global warming, a successor to the coming ice age).

To repeat: What happened to acid rain? Or rather — to ask this differently — what does the Left say happened to acid rain? Did their crusade take care of the problem — or did they simply get bored, searching out different alarmist pastures?

(You will recall that, at the beginning of the George W. Bush administration, the Left and the media claimed that the Republicans were “putting arsenic back into the water” — that was before the administration began wiretapping Aunt Hazel’s phone, for no good reason.)

I don’t know what happened to acid rain. But I continue to be amazed at the rapid flickering out of the most burning issues in American life. Just wait a little while: Global warming will be the dangerous new ice age again. Environmentalist scaremongering is sort of like hemlines.