Commentary

PRESIDENT GOT IT ALL WRONG

There he was on the front page of The Post-Star, eyeing the splitting maul
in his hand like it was some fascinating foreign implement.

Behind him were some of the people of Wilmington, and they were eyeing
President Bush in the same way he was looking at that maul.

They were thinking about which way they should duck if he actually swung
that thing.

But they were smiling through their fear, trying to act right in the
presidential presence.

The whole presidential promenade into the chilly heart of Essex County must
have been very confusing for the people who live there. No one famous or
powerful goes to Wilmington, unless they're skiing at Whiteface. But here
was the most famous and the most powerful man in the country, standing
without a hat on in the freezing woods, snow dusting his perfect hair.

He was there for Earth Day, an event that usually passes without notice in
Wilmington and elsewhere in Essex County.

When you're surrounded by hundreds of thousands of acres of forests where
no one lives and no one wants to, Earth Day loses significance.

In Wilmington, people feel as much urgency about Earth Day as they do about
global warming. If January gets a few degrees warmer, good.

The least the president could have done, before coming up to our woods to
swing some manly tools, is to get his history straight.

"In the North Country of New York, you have chosen the way of cooperation,"
he said. "You've set a standard for good conservation."

That's exactly wrong. It would be hard to find a worse example of
cooperation on the environment than the Adirondacks. Everything that has
been done in the Adirondack Park to preserve its vast wilderness has been
forced upon a small and unwilling local population by the state.

The local people have chafed under the authority of the Adirondack Park
Ageny, rebelled against its edicts, fought its enforcement.

If cooperation was the theme, the president should have talked about the
war on drugs when he was in Wilmington, because the one thing that state
officials and people in the Adirondacks have worked together to get done is
the construction of prisons.

When the state's oppressive environmental laws made it impossible for any
other industry to locate in the Adirondacks, the people there begged for
prisons, and the state obliged.

So perhaps next time he comes for a visit, the president can grab a rifle
instead of a maul, and join a guard on in Dannemora or Ray Brook or Malone
or Comstock or Moriah or Onchiota. Then it'll make sense when he talks
about cooperation.