I’ve always thought that the “Republicans for Environmental Protection” enterprise had a slightly comical Cold War overtone to it — (insert cartoonish accent for effect) Boris, vat do you zay vee eztablish group on campoos? Sumzeeng like Conservative American Patriots Opposed to Blowing Up Voorld? Sort of like an incorporated “seminar caller,” as Rush labels them — hey, longtime listener, I usually agree with you and I’m a Republican but this current bunch is really dreadful/wrong/dreadful/enjoy stuffing nuclear waste and babies down the disposal at night . . .

I’ve gotten some mail about the group’s latest “look at me!” effort – a “What Would Reagan Do?” about, ahem, global warming — designed to encourage whatever other Lindsey Grahams there are out there to accept this latest excuse for the statists’ long-held list of demands, to trade energy security today for a bag of magic beans in the form of studies and commissions and scraps possibly to be awarded sometime tomorrow.

My instinctive reaction is that Reagan would have had tremendous fun with these guys, possibly deliver some punch line on the danger of abrupt island inversion, then proceed to focus on real, demonstrated threats to our security. Like, well, the global-warming agenda.

Which would probably conclude with a typically piquant education from the Gipper reminding the public how the agenda of mandating and dictating the minutiae of economic activity — which not even Republicans for Environmental Protection will dare say would have according to anyone a detectable impact on climate under any scenario or set of assumptions — had been tried, a little to our east, and worked out so well they had to build a wall to keep all of the millionaires in.

Keep trying, fellas. You never know how many Lindsey Grahams or Hank Johnsons are out there until you ask.