Peter Schweizer’s Do As I Say (Not As I Do) is a brilliant expostion of liberal hypocrisy. The Kennedy family all by itself provides substantial material for Peter’s book. For example, Schweizer discusses Ted Kennedy’s opposition to a wind power project on Nantucket Sound that would apparently impair the view from the Kennedy family compound six miles away. Not in his backyard! (Peter’s book has a serious point. Peter argues that the behavior of notable liberals conflicting with their professed beliefs shows their beliefs to be “ultimately self-defeating, self-destructive, and unworkable.”)
Alex Beam writes a column for the Boston Globe. I’m not familiar with Beam’s work, but the current issue of the Weekly Standard carries Beam’s very funny review of Cape Wind: Money, Celebrity, Class, Politics and the Battle for America’s Energy Future on Nantucket Sound by Wendy Williams and Robert Whitcomb. Unfortunately, Beam’s review is restricted to subscribers.
Cape Wind is the 24-square-mile, turbine-powered electrical power project to be built in Horseshoe Shoal that is discussed in Schweizer’s book. Cape Wind chronicles the opposition of wealthy Cape Cod residents and Martha’s Vineyard islanders such as David McCullough, Walter Cronkite, and all manner of Kennedys, Mellons and Duponts to Cape Wind:
The Mellons and the DuPonts have summered on the Cape for a lot longer than former cable TV salesman Jim Gordon [the entrepreneur behind Cape Wind] has been a millionaire, and, naturally, they have powerful friends. Cue the pathetic marital opportunist Sen. John Warner, who nominally represents the people of Virginia. Blubbering to the Senate’s Environment and Public Works Committee, Warner invokes his first, pre-Elizabeth Taylor, wife: “A wonderful person who is still a very dear and valued friend. . . . She does have a home on the Cape. I was actually married there.”
The wonderful woman in question is Catherine Mellon, daughter of Bunny, the widow of Paul Mellon. Bunny, who is the first person named in Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis’s will–Jackie left her two Indian miniatures, by way of thanks for Bunny’s help in redesigning the White House Rose Garden–is an ardent Cape Wind opponent. In the book, she accuses a lawyer who does not hate Cape Wind assiduously enough of being a “traitor to your class.” That’s language you expect to hear on Masterpiece Theater, not in George W. Bush’s America.
Beam describes the book:
The authors relate how, pace President Bush, Cape Wind has proved to be a uniter, not a divider. Outraged by the shenanigans on Capitol Hill–not only Warner, but also Alaska’s notorious “bridge to nowhere” congressman Don Young have tried to throttle the child of Aeolus in its watery crib-such unlikely bedfellows as Robert Novak, the Washington Post, and the Washington Times have leapt to Cape Wind’s defense.
How rare for Sun Myung Moon’s scribblers, to say nothing of Rupert Murdoch’s salarymen at Fox News, to find themselves allied with the merry pranksters from Greenpeace, who have injected some badly needed humor into the Cape Wind imbroglio. Greenpeace produced an ad showing a roly-poly senator standing knee-deep in salt water, brandishing a wooden mallet. As wind turbines surface, the senator smashes them down, Whac-a-Mole style, complaining that “I might see them from my mansion on the Cape.” Fox News commentators Sean Hannity and Alan Colmes loved the ad, and gave it air play.
Greenpeace teased Robert Kennedy Jr. during an anti-Cape Wind photo op and infiltrated a Ted Kennedy book-signing in Washington. While the senior senator from Massachusetts signed copies of America Back on Track, replete with predictable complaints about the country’s energy policy, Greenpeaceniks handed out dummy book covers to people waiting in line. Their alternate title: How I Killed America’s First Offshore Wind Farm.
I ask you, where is the respect?
Beam devoted a Globe column to the book in “Dirty politics, clean power on the Cape.” Also of note among Beam’s recent columns is “A silent springtime for Hitler?”
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