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With that he barreled off the stage, and the moderator of the next panel began to speak. But Jackson appeared again in the middle of the crowd, spotlight shining down on him.

"Y'all probably wondering why I'm out here," Jackson said. "I wanted everyone to see how much weight I've lost. I have not been working out. I'm on the South Beach Diet. Low carb is the way to go, my friends."

We Want a Shrubbery!

Before the Environment Votes 2004 rally yesterday morning, I ran into a group of folks calling themselves United Shrubs of America. They were selling small bushes and passing out postcards with messages from the plants that read: "There are millions of us, and every one is a patriotic, law-abiding resident of this great land. Normally we're quite easygoing houseplants. But this year we just can't sit around in our pots and be silent. The guy you didn't actually elect as president, who likes to call himself a BUSH, well, he's really bad for a plant's health."

I stood there for a couple minutes before I realized I was standing next to Janet Reno. Apparently the former Attorney General was as taken in by these shrubs as I was. There was no word on how shrubs fared in that ill-fated raid in Texas a few years back.

The speaker who drew the loudest applause was director Rob "Meathead" Reiner, who started off by explaining how his movie The American President influenced Bill Clinton's environmental policy.

"Clinton loved that film," Reiner bragged. "His staff didn't want him to watch it when he was campaigning because he'd get too revved up."

Reiner also patted himself on the back for his performance four years ago in a debate with our own Ben Stein. Reiner told the crowd that he had advocated "intellectual curiosity" as an admirable presidential trait, while Stein had pushed something along the lines of, "Who cares if Bush is stupid if he has good advisers?"

After comparing environmental decay to terrorism, Reiner paused before getting all mushy on the crowd: "The two things I care most about are the environment and young children. In the end that is all we have. If we don't have those two things, then all these issues we wrestle with don't really matter."

The logic is there. Without a public there can be no public policy. But is any candidate for office arguing for the destruction of "young children"? I mean, besides the pro-abortion party he's stumping for?

The true lunatic of the proceedings -- who jumps to the head of a queue that includes former EPA head Carol Browner, Rep. Mark Udall, and New York Attorney General Eliot Spitzer -- was clearly Bobby Kennedy Jr., who started off by calling George W. Bush "the biggest threat to the environment," putting him above global warming and acid rain. Bobby also said that Bush looked at the environment as a "business in liquidation," which constitutes "a kind of treason."

"If even a fraction of this administration's proposals get through, one year from now there will be effectively no federal environmental law in this country," he said. "This is not exaggeration. This is not hyperbole. This is fact." All of this amounted to a "science fiction nightmare" about to spring to life.

Kennedy flailed, repeated himself, lost his voice twice, and showed absolutely none of the poise and charm that are the hallmarks of his family. There he was bang, bang, banging on the podium, looking wild-eyed out into the crowd, which incidentally was giving every other line a standing ovation, so happy to take the worst possible forecast for the future of mankind at face value.

The Stupid Party

"What's the convention really like?" readers keep asking me.

topics:
Barack Obama, Bill Clinton, Business, Abortion, Environment, Books, Law, Supreme Court, Military, Iraq, Energy