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" In the wake of the Gaggle on the Guyland last night, people have commented to me as to how remarkable they found the exchange between the president and Willard Romney on the subject of gun control \u2014 which began, you may recall, with both men swearing reflexive fealty to the Supreme Court&amp;#039;s opinion that a right to individual ownership of firearms is contained in the Second Amendment. Of course, they both also committed themselves to &amp;quot;enforcing the laws that we have,&amp;quot; which are working so very well, and the president delivered himself of the opinion that allowing drug dealers to arm themselves as though they were the Seventh Cavalry is probably something of a hindrance to the maintenance of civil society. Meanwhile, Romney tried to get out from under the political deadweight of having signed an assault-weapons ban in Massachusetts, using it as an example of his gifts for bipartisanship rather than as a laudable attempt to keep the slaughter in the streets down to a minimum. All in all, it was a classic example of an issue that has been removed from the political dialogue and placed in cold storage for the foreseeable future. You know what&amp;#039;s next into the freezer? Climate change. We have had three debates now, counting the Biden-Ryan fandango, and we have not had one extended conversation about the most pressing environmental catastrophe since the meteor wiped out the dinosaurs. On Tuesday night, we had two guys arguing about who&amp;#039;s a bigger friend to coal, about who will allow the most oil drilling on federal land, and about who will best extract the most carbon-based fuels out from under the country over the next four years. On the subject of the dreadful Keystone XL pipeline, Romney again appeared to be willing to dig the trench himself while the president, who acted to delay the project, said nothing. At this moment, in Texas, and in Canada, and in the Dakotas, people are getting tossed into the sneezer for protesting this attempt to bring the dirtiest fuel in the history of mankind down the spine of the continent and straight through most of the arable farmland of the United States, all the way to Texas, whence it will be sold to China. And the debate was one guy who wants to build it tomorrow and one guy who was mute. Some issues become orphans because politicians essentially agree that they should; the president&amp;#039;s use of drones to conduct a war of personal discretion is not going to come up because Romney believes that the drones are a good idea that simply don&amp;#039;t go far enough and, besides... Benghazi! Some issues become orphans because people are just tired of arguing about them to no good purpose; gun control is one of those, although Romney did try to gin things up by slouching into Fast-and-Furious fauxtrage. But climate change is an issue that has become an orphan in this campaign because it is simply too big for our political system to handle. The planet, quite simply, is dying of a fever, and everybody can see the symptoms, and everybody who isn&amp;#039;t Jim Inhofe or some other mountain troll knows precisely what the cause is. But not even this president, for all his besotted devotion to green technologies, can talk straight to the American people about what is murdering the earth and why. Wildfires. Superstorms. Drought. The fact that there actually is a Northwest Passage through the Arctic from the Atlantic to the Pacific now. The warnings get more and more dire. Yet we have had three debates and the simple question of how we keep from killing the planet never comes up? Future historians \u2014 if there are any future historians \u2014 are going to drink very heavily. FURTHER READING: More on the Debates and the Environment &amp;amp;gt;&amp;amp;gt; "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.esquire.com/news-politics/politics/a16331/climate-change-2012-election-13818160/>