Cato the Elder famously dragged Carthage into every speech, calling for it to be destroyed. Like a modern-day Cato who has played the DVD of "An Inconvenient Truth" way too many times, The Boston Globe manages to drag global warming into an editorial this morning about, of all things, the baby that Mary Cheney is expecting. In doing so, the Globe hypocritically invades the very Cheney privacy it claims to want to champion.

Writing of the decision of Cheney and Heather Poe to bring a child into the world, the Globe claims that:

"Like any couple choosing to become parents, they must have concluded that the joy of raising a child outweighs the uncertainties of introducing it to a planet threatened by global warming, nuclear proliferation, and other terrors of the modern world."

"Like any couple"? If you're a parent out there, please raise your hand if, in deciding to extend your line, you took the possiblity of rising sea levels into account. A number of authors, including Mark Steyn in America Alone, have written of the danger that the West's low reproduction rates pose to the survival of our civilization. But there is every indication that motives have more to do with preserving a certain kind of lifestyle than anxiety over the ozone layer.

The editorial concludes with this bit of do-as-I-say-not-as-I-do coupled with pandering to the younger set:

"The best baby shower gift for them may be privacy and time -- because time will encourage the good common sense of young people to dawn on the rest of the nation."

The best gift is privacy? Such as in not writing editorials exploiting the pregnancy to advance your own political agenda? Seems the dawn of good common sense hasn't risen over Beantown yet.

Update: Harry Forbes at 'Squaring the Boston Globe' discusses the editorial and the Globe's hypocrisy here.

Contact Mark at mark@gunhill.net

—Mark Finkelstein is a NewsBusters contributing editor and host of Right Angle. Contact him at mark@gunhill.net.