Move over ladies, the left has discovered a new bloc to exploit for votes. While I originally mistook Molly Ball’s piece lamenting the GOP’s “War on caterpillars” for an Onion piece, that it is apparently a serious piece and housed at The Atlantic only increases the amusement.
Ball opens with breathless urgency:
In a statement widely taken as a metaphor, the chairman of the Republican National Committee on Thursday said his party is no more trying to hurt the nation’s females than it is larval butterflies and moths.But the war on caterpillars and other innocent insects, it turns out, is not a fiction at all.
Ball takes a joke made by RNC Chairman Reince Priebus and wrings all the humor out of it. She then accuses Republicans of wanting to violate caterpillars’ right to life with chemicals that would save crops and increase wellness during mosquito season.
Last year, GOP Sen. Pat Roberts of Kansas authored a letter, signed by several others in his party, calling on Democrats to “address the continued regulatory overreach by the Environmental Protection Agency that is a growing concern of farmers, ranchers, foresters and agribusinesses throughout the nation” by bringing up their bill to ease pesticide regulations. This obvious attempt to run roughshod over the rights of many-legged herbivores everywhere was laughably justified as a matter of “public health as we enter mosquito season.”
Insects receive more attention from Democrats than infants.
Ball then admonishes conservatives for being insensitive to the rights of “Creepy-Crawly-Americans” by wanting to remove restrictions on DDT, the banning of which contributed to millions of deaths.
Republicans may claim that they have no anti-caterpillar agenda — that they’re just trying to protect people and plants from being bitten, that they’re merely the victims of a liberal media that sympathizes with the radical bugs’-rights lobby. But the truth is clear, and it’s nothing new: Republicans just don’t care about caterpillars.
I disagree. The majority of Republicans believe in being good stewards of the environment — there’s a difference between conservation and environmentalism which progressives fail to understand. Republicans just don’t believe in being silly about it, especially when lives are at stake.