white house environmentalism?
i got needlessly excited this morning when i saw this headline in the new york times: Protecting the Presidential Seal. No Joke. i assumed that the administration had wised up and replaced the president or his puppeteer (dick!) with a sea-faring animal. i'm a big friend to seals because we have much in common: we love to sun our big bellies, we love seafood, we are awkward on land, we bray a lot, i could go on. i thought this would bring vast improvement to environmental policy since the presidential seal would surely do his best to protect our oceans and guarantee bountiful habitat for tasty, tasty fish (i love lox, mr. or mrs. president). and our foreign policy disputes could be resolved by puffing up our chests, running into each other and braying loudly until we're tired, as the seals do. and seals would not bring radical change to the white house since they, like the current occupant, also spend a majority of their time napping.
then i actually read the story and it turns out that the administration is actually suing the spoof newspaper the onion for using the presidential seal on their website. i agree with the onion that the use of the seal is not going to be interpreted as presidential endorsement of the content since we all know that the president does not read newspapers, even the spoof ones, except for the funny pages.