Before he voted against it

Hugh Hewitt reports that Senator Kerry, in an appearance on MTV, condemned President Bush for renouncing the Kyoto treaty:

"He turned his back on global warming, walked away from a treaty that a hundred and sixty nations worked ten years on."

Kerry, in contrast, is proud to have backed Kyoto. He even has a page on his campaign website with quotes from friends of the earth who boast of Kerry's love of the environment and his support for Kyoto.

Huh. Funny thing about that. Steven Den Beste, in a very lengthy but very insightful essay, says that the Senate rejected Kyoto unanimously:

Once Bush became President, one of his first acts was to publicly repudiate the Kyoto treaty and, more or less, "unsign" it. For that Bush has been excoriated internationally, as somehow being the one � and the only one � responsible for America not joining the Kyoto accord. Notably absent from that castigation was any mention of Byrd-Hagel, which killed Kyoto dead long before Bush became President. That's because Byrd-Hagel passed unanimously. Republican senators and Democratic senators both saw through the rhetoric and fully understood that the Kyoto accord really had nothing to do with "global warming". Its true purpose was to cripple the US economy through artificial imposition of energy shortages, and they had no intention of letting that happen.

Clinton knew full well that there was no chance of the Senate ever ratifying the Kyoto accord. So did Bush. The only real difference between them was that Bush was willing to say so publicly. Kyoto was not a Republican-versus-Democrat issue, it was an America-versus-Europe issue, and every member of the Senate voted in favor of Byrd-Hagel in order to say that they favored America. (Emphasis added.)

Every member of the Senate voted against Kyoto. John Kerry was a member of the Senate then. Did he vote against Kyoto? Yes. Yes, he did.

No April foolin'.

--JOHANNES CLERK