Editorial - Greetings From Jerry Brown's Planet California

California has a major water crisis the way 1990s New York once had an urban blight crisis. But don't look for a Rudy Giuliani to the rescue. The state's governor, Jerry Brown, has morphed into a full-blown space cadet.

...Instead of displaying sharp-minded leadership, Brown waxed soulfully about the philosophical implications of water when asked about the crisis at a University of Southern California conference on Tuesday.

"You said water is a commodity," he said. "Some people call water a right, some people call water the essence of life. Water is more than H2O. Water is baptism. Water is a poetry. Water has an iconic role in human history and the human condition, so how we play with water — it's not like a widget."

We're not making this up. He really said that in a conversation with the publisher of the Times.

Rather than blame the water crisis on his own failures to construct water-storage facilities to ensure that water from wet years is saved for dry years, or present new technological possibilities for long-term solutions, Brown said the crisis was all about global warming.

"This goes to the very foundation of what it means to be human in a world of living things ," he said. "The heat-trapping gases that our society generates are creating alterations in the fundamentals of our whole atmosphere. We may have already passed a tipping point."

...He also reverted to the "small is beautiful" philosophy last preached during his wretched first term as governor in the 1970s. Californians will have to find a "more elegant" way of using and reusing water, he told the USC crowd, not mentioning that the last idea that came from his office was recycling urine.
"The metaphor is spaceship Earth," he explained. "In a spaceship you reuse everything."

With Brown and others of his ilk, it's always the people who are at fault, not the incompetence and irresponsibility of their leaders.

READ ENTIRE EDITORIAL