The Storm Lake Times: Opinion

Honesty in short supply

We are inundated with press releases from politicians and political causes every day. This one caught our attention for its irony: “Grassley calls for intellectual honesty about deficits, spending, entitlements.” In the body of the release, Sen. Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, ranking member of the Senate Finance Committee, claims that Democrats have been writing “revisionist history” about how we reached record deficit levels.

Before we get to revisionist history, let’s discuss “intellectual” honesty, or lack thereof.

Sen. Grassley claimed to be seeking a bipartisan health care reform plan when he hogtied his good friend Finance Committee Chairman Max Baucus, D-Mont., and proceeded to logroll health reform plans for months while Republicans, including Honest Chuck, lied about death panels and what the bill included.

He claimed to be bipartisan. In fact, he was following orders from the top Congressional Republicans to use health care to bring down Obama through his centerpiece legislation. Grassley single-handedly bought time for the lies to fester.

That’s what amounts to “intellectual” honesty these days in Washington. All that drives Grassley’s intellect is the desire to gain back the chairmanship of the powerful finance committee. Chuck Grassley is about power, not honesty or intellect.

Now to revisionist history.

Obama blames Bush for the deficits. Grassley says that Congressional Democrats went along with Bush. Yes, they did, including Sen. Tom Harkin, D-Iowa, who declared on National Public Radio his vote for the Invasion of Iraq as the worst of his career. It was the Iraq war that gave rise to deficits, not spending on food stamps or energy assistance or Grassley’s beloved tax credits for wind turbine development. Not to mention the death of more than 100,000 Iraqis in a civil war that our invasion unleashed, most of whom were innocents.

Deficits further ballooned when Obama continued the Big Bank Bailout kicked off by the Bush Administration. This after Bush kept his hands off Wall Street regulation thinking, as Fed Chairman Alan Greenspan did, that financial deregulation would work everything out.

It worked out all right. Right to the precipice of another Great Depression.

Obama and Congress — Democrat and Republican — had no choice but to continue the bailouts and hope that something sticks. Something did stick: We avoided another Great Depression, the Dow Jones is up more than 30%, and Midwest manufacturing is rebounding.

We realize that Grassley is playing the contemporary politics game, where you turn a lie into the truth if you repeat it enough. That’s revisionist history defined. Grassley has become an expert at it. And we used to think him an honest man.

Biofuels find lifeline

The Environmental Protection Agency this week gave the green light to more production of corn-based ethanol and soy-based biodiesel by declaring the two fuels environmentally friendly enough, just barely. The EPA made certain that farm-state senators stayed aboard with climate initiatives by protecting their precious biofuels.

The ag lobby claims that existing biofuels are good for the environment. That is the subject of much debate, and you must have your doubts when you consider the petroleum base on which corn is grown, and the soil loss involving planting corn on corn.

We have never believed ethanol or biodiesel to be environmental elixirs.

They are national security keys.

That’s the argument to make. Any plant scientist could figure that corn ethanol or biodiesel is a net plus to the environment, and other scientists could debunk the theory.

There is no question, however, that more than half of our geopolitical troubles involve oil. That’s why we’re in Iraq, it’s why we defend despots in Saudi Arabia, and why we worry about Hugo Chavez of Venezuela becoming entirely unreasonable.

Biofuels are a small but important step in weaning ourselves from foreign oil — and oil altogether, someday.

They provide a marginal economic boost to rural workers and communities searching for a way forward. They are proving to be a good source of protein by-products for livestock.

Those are all good reasons to support biofuels, but not for their environmental benefit.

The EPA decision underscores how dependent on government this nascent industry is. Remember that when political winds change, so can the prospects for an industry on which Iowa has banked much.