Excellent ending, DR.

George Will is clearly very learned (and a great stylist), and so one might go wrong by underestimating him.  Nevertheless he is regularly crotchety and infuriating, at least on the end page of every other Newsweek, which is where I read him, so by all means fire away.

Regarding the listing of polar bears, and the fecklessness of the gesture, the common word from various sources, with no clearly partisan leaning, has been that the ESA is too slender and flimsy a legislative instrument by which to support an enlightened policy on global-warming mitigation.  To which, in response, I ask, Why?  Do not the interpretations and applications of laws evolve over time?

TheGreenMiles, your chronology puzzles me.  Civil rights for African-Americans, women's rights, and environmentalism bloomed in the 1960s, with gay rights too toward the end: all big issues in the culture wars.  It is true that people were starting to read On the origin of species in the 1860s, which would before long open up another front in the culture wars.  But by the same time, socialists of one flavor or another had already been flourishing, including one which we may call Hot-Chile-Strawberry-Swirl, associated with Marx and Engels (The Communist Manifesto was published in 1848).

Chickens deserve our true friendship! So do fish! So do other sentient beings! Let us learn to be kind.

Surely you jest, Canis? It would take a treatise to properly debunk Will, but look at this one paragraph:
What Friedrich Hayek called the "fatal conceit" -- the idea that government can know the future's possibilities and can and should control the future's unfolding -- is the left's agenda. The left exists to enlarge the state's supervision of life, narrowing individual choices in the name of collective goods. Hence the left's hostility to markets. And to automobiles -- people going wherever they want whenever they want.
Here we have Will setting himself up as the savior of individual freedom against those evil power-hungry "leftists" at the door. With his sharp intellect he sees through the environmental myth of global warming as a way for the Stalinists to take over and confine everyone to the Gulag? Is this really credible?

Now who is it that wants to take away a woman's right to choose? Who is it that makes the U.S. the largest prison state in the world? Who shredded the Constitution (undue searches, habeas corpus, etc.)? Don't get me started on the right-wing...

As for taking away people's cars, the oil markets will take care of that!

It just goes to show, Colin, that having a great deal of learning does not correlate at all either with improved judgment, or with improved conscience.

If World War I was not the most idiotic of all wars, it certainly was the most deadly of all idiotic wars.  And yet, the officers, even the junior officers, on both sides, were remarkably well-educated.

In World War II -- which was NOT an idiotic war in itself, though many idiotic things were perpetrated in the course of it -- , the much vilified kamikaze pilots seem to have been a group of idealistic young men many of whom were just about the best educated people of their age on the planet, with a formidable background in European languages and the Western liberal arts.

In this case, by no means do I mean to defend George Will.  All I am saying is, he is a sophist with a long professional background; if he seems to blunder, well, he has probably figured out the game a few moves ahead, and the blunders, and appearances of weakness, are quite intentional.

And unfortunately, victory for him means no more than momentary befuddlement of his adversaries (i.e., us, and such as us), and with that, a cheer-leaderish reassurance to those on his side (such as they are).

On how we, and such as we, are all Stalinists (haha): I can sort of see that, actually.  I mean, no, we are certainly not "Stalinists."  But, many environmentalists are concerned about the welfare of all kinds of underprivileged, the "have-nots," and have always demanded regulations or redirections of the "haves" -- with the result that the "haves" and their spokespuppets can easily (well, glibly, rhetorically) accuse us of communism and class-warfare-mongering.

On shredding the Constitution: Not that I especially care about the purity or venerability of the term "conservative," but the very fact that so many Republicans delight in restricting constitutional rights plainly demonstrates that they are not truly conservative.  True conservatives, one might think, should be the staunchest defenders of the Constitution; but when they say, by way of defending warrantless surveillance and the dismissal of the habeas corpus provision (glibly!) that "the Constitution is not a suicide pact," we should be prompt to drive a wedge, and accuse them of being false and hypocritical conservatives.

Chickens deserve our true friendship! So do fish! So do other sentient beings! Let us learn to be kind.

Who is this guy? Another naive fool who thinks the ESA is going to be a carte blanche tool to turn our entire economic system on its head.

If the polar bears go down, too bad. They're nasty animals anyway.

"Preventing further species extinctions from climate change will require a society-wide mobilization beyond anything in this country's history. Yet that's what our law implies. We said we'd protect the earth's other species.

Did we mean it?"

Of course we didn't mean it to the point where the country was planning on committing collective suicide to preserve polar bears. We'll give them nice pens in the zoo. Get real!

The fool who wrote this thinks we are going to turn off all of our power generation capacity, and in the process bankrupt the country and starves millions of our citizens for polar bears?????

Jesus H. Christ, what another whack job.

Victory in Pattani