Ash shame

More fake effects of that hoax tree huggers call "global warming."

Careers at stake with each swing, baseball players leave little to sport when it comes to their bats. They weigh them. They count their grains. They talk to them.

But in towns like this one, in the heart of the mountain forests that supply the nation’s finest baseball bats, the future of the ash tree is in doubt because of a killer beetle and a warming climate, and with it, the complicated relationship of the baseball player to his bat.

“No more ash?” said Juan Uribe, a Chicago White Sox shortstop, whose batting coach says he speaks to his ash bats every day. Uribe is so finicky about his bats, teammates say, that he stores them separately in the team’s dugout and complains bitterly if anyone else touches them.

At a baseball bat factory tucked into the lush tree country here in northwestern Pennsylvania, the operators have drawn up a three-to-five-year emergency plan if the white ash tree, which has been used for decades to make the bat of choice, is compromised.

In Michigan, the authorities have begun collecting the seeds of ash trees for storage in case the species is wiped out, a possibility some experts now consider inevitable.

As early as this summer, federal officials hope to set loose Asian wasps never seen in this country with the purpose of attacking the emerald ash borer, an Asian beetle accused of killing 25 million ash trees in Michigan, Illinois, Indiana, Ohio and Maryland since it was spotted in the United States five years ago.

If ash bats become unavailale or too soft to be used in baseball bats, most players probably will turn to maple for their bats.

This is one more problem I blame on the Bush administration for its loyalty to the oil and coal industries, refusal to acknowledge the climate problem and it's whitewashing of government environmental reports (link, link, link, link, you get the idea) to downplay the impact of human activity on the climate.

We're all aware of the Bush administration's impact on Iraq, Afghanistan, the economy, the military, the rule of law, the Justice Department, the Supreme Court, voting rights and the environment. And now the Bush administration's refusal to admit that global warming exists even threatens a species of tree and could mean the end of a lengthy baseball tradition. Is there anything, anything that hasn't been damaged by the Bush administration?

Could it be that George Bush is the biggest fuck-up in human history?