"Environmentalists"

Perhaps the group I hate the most are the self-congratulatory "environmentalists" who spend far too much time telling the world just how great they really are.

Count Kathleen Hughes of the New York Times among them.

She writes this sickly saccharine, self-gratifying column in the Times in which she goes on and on about how great she it is that she is sacrificing so much to dry her clothes on a clothesline instead of in a dryer. She's so needy for everyone to know just how much she cares for the planet that she initially wanted to hang her clothes out in the front yard, just to show all of her neighbors. Thankfully, her family had more of the right idea. What kills me the most, though, is how impossibly wasteful her electricity usage is.

She started using the clothes line after getting a monthly bill of over $1,100 last summer. She prides herself on having a March bill of "only" $576. In March. When it was cold. The unmitigated gall she has lecturing the public on how wasteful they are with their electric use when she's spending that much on it herself shouldn't shock me anymore, but I guess it still does. After all, when you take a peek at the electric bills of Al Gore and John Edwards, all the while they're preaching about conservation. I have sadly come to expect this from the right, elitist leftists. Sadly this lack of self-perception seems to have infected her daughter as well, who notes: "It looks like we care about the earth, " when clothes are hung on the clothesline, but who is "always busy at the computer."

This is the essence of their hypocrisy: trying to look like they care about the earth while blowing through 3 to 5 times as much energy as average Americans.