Frooma Harrop looks at how the great liberal leader, Ted Kennedy, plus a bipartisan group of Washington politicians have been working to stop the construction of a wind farm five miles off the shores of their summer homes.
The towers would be at least five miles out and barely visible from shore on the clearest day, but the summer plutocrats resent any intrusion on their waterfront vistas -- and, equally, any challenge to the notion that they control everything.
"But don't you realize -- that's where I sail!" may stand as Kennedy's most self-incriminating quote.
The sordid affair is documented in a funny and depressing book titled "Cape Wind: Money, Celebrity, Class, Politics and the Battle for Our Energy Future on Nantucket Sound." In it, authors Wendy Williams and Robert Whitcomb (full disclosure: Whitcomb is my editor at The Providence Journal) describe the bipartisan endeavor to betray America's environmental and energy interests -- and ignore the welfare of the year-round locals.
What is amazing is the other politicians who are helping Kennedy in trying to slip provisions into federal bills to help stop the construction of the environmentally friendly wind farm.
Kennedy did much of the dirty work in Washington, but he had considerable help. In 2004, Sen. John Warner, the Virginia Republican, added a last-minute rider to an urgent Iraq War funding bill that forbade the Army Corps of Engineers to spend money permitting offshore wind projects.
"Warner was dragging American troops into the Cape Wind war," Williams and Whitcomb noted. The outcry forced him to back down.
Why did Warner care so deeply about a wind-energy project in Massachusetts? Some of his fabulously wealthy relatives own choice waterfront property on Cape Cod. That's why.
Anchorage is 4,600 miles from Boston. And so what was this project to Rep. Don Young, the Alaska Republican? It was apparently an opportunity to exercise an old grudge against Theodore Roosevelt IV, the 26th president's great-grandson and a wind-farm supporter.
Republican Sen. Lamar Alexander also took an unusual interest in a venture far from his home state of Tennessee. Complaining that wind farms threaten "the wholesale destruction of the American landscape," Alexander introduced legislation that would have banned virtually all offshore wind projects in America. It turns out that Alexander owns a fancy piece of real estate on Nantucket Island.
I guess the concern about the environment and alternate sources of energy stops at the water's edge, at least when that edge is your own private beachhouse.
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