NEWSWEEK: Obama’s Big Green Mess: How the White House lost its eco-mojo.

UPDATE: Mickey Kaus tweets: If Obama’s lost Eleanor Clift … what’s next? Valerie Jarrett says he’s not ready to be President?

ANOTHER UPDATE: Reader Corinna Cohn emails:

Eleanor Clift wrote, “Some of the biggest immediate beneficiaries of the green revolution, ironically, may have been politicians themselves.”

Only a dyed-in-the-wool liberal could express surprise that politicians would receive campaign contributions as kickbacks from industries to which they’ve funneled millions of taxpayers’ dollars.

Actually, lots of liberals used to be smart enough to see things like that coming. Now they’ve either gotten dumber, or complicit.

MORE: Reader Matthew Knecht writes:

You tag this post with the line “Actually, lots of liberals used to be smart enough to see things like that coming. Now they’ve either gotten dumber, or complicit.”

Speaking as a public school educator in Pennsylvania for most of the last 20 years, I say “both.” The savvy ones are complicit. Most are victims of the decaying public school system. We spent so much time for the last 30 years filling their heads with nonsense that there was no time to teach the important things, like how government and economics actually work. Real, time-tested knowledge about how human beings behave in real life (AKA history and philosophy), are rarely even referred to in public school curricula any longer except in the most superficial ways. We’re now into a second and even third generation of public school teachers raised on politically correct revisionism. They’re not engaging in deliberate social engineering any more; many if not most of the teachers actually believe that the fluff ideas they’ve been taught to promulgate are how the world really works… leading to whole generations of kids without a single clue as to how any human societies — especially messy, complicated democratic ones that require a lot of personal responsibility — actually function. It’s no wonder our political class has sunk to the current depths. Their map doesn’t match the territory.

Bottom line: not dumb, just brainwashed, most of them. They were never taught any better, because they were taught by people who were never taught any better, who were taught by people who were deliberating trying to alter the American culture through the public school system. We’re rapidly approaching, if not already in, the educational Dark Age that Jerry Pournelle talks about: not only have we forgotten certain knowledge we had in the past, but we’ve forgotten (institutionally speaking) that we ever even knew that stuff. Because it’s not nice, and it doesn’t make us feel good to learn about it.

Well, that’s depressing. Meanwhile, another reader emails:

The problem is that we no longer have a mainstream press that holds Democrats’ feet to the fire. So by not being under scrutiny by the major press, they can get away with things like this. Over time, they walk farther out on the limb of corruption because there is nobody calling attention to it.

Sure, you have some blogs that point it out, but that is “pull” media, you have to actively go and get it. The “push” media, the information that arrives on your car radio during your commute or on your TV set never mentions it.

You can’t lay all of America’s problems at the feet of the mainstream media. But it’s a good place to start . . . .