Tammy Bruce: California Dems’ commitment to being official clown car of the Democratic Party continues

California’s commitment to being the official clown car of the Democratic Party continues apace.

The latest absurdity is brought to us by legislation from the Democratically controlled state legislature seeking to ban all those little plastic toiletry bottles one finds in hotel rooms.

”‘We know we have an enormous problem with our world, we’ve become addicted to [plastic], and it’s caused a major dilemma environmentally,’ said Assemblyman Ash Kalra, who introduced Bill AB-1162 in February,” Fox News reported.

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This urgent need for legislation is due to, of course, climate change. Plastic is pouring into our oceans, harming the ecosystem and destroying the lives of animals. But don’t tell Democrats that the culprit isn’t pesky Americans or the United States. No, it’s actually the direct fault of five Asian nations, led by China.

Last year, a headline at Forbes said, “5 Asian countries dump more plastic into oceans than anyone else combined.” China, Indonesia, Philippines, Thailand and Vietnam are the culprits, according to a 2017 report by Ocean Conservancy and cited by the news magazine.

This is an awful problem, and not only will banning the tiny traveler-size shampoo bottles from hotels in California not help, it does damage in that it sends a message to Americans that they’re actually doing something to solve the problem when nothing could be further from the truth.

The solution, California says, is for hotels and resorts to install refillable dispensers in bathrooms. But one of the beneficial things of these tiny bottles is that you are met with the message that the hotel shower is not a spa. The tiny bottles themselves tell you to hurry it up. For a state with droughts, you would think that would be an important message. But that would require thinking, which is in short supply these days in the Golden State.

Eventually, you know California will not be able to abide convenience and drug stores selling the travel-sized toiletries, either. As Americans are inclined to do, this might evolve into a new sort of entrepreneurism.

I can’t wait to see a man standing in front of hotel-approaching tourists, flinging open his trench coat revealing a myriad of tiny bottle toiletries for the reasonable black market price of $10 each — Pantene shampoo and conditioner, the tiny Gold Bond hand cream, miniature Secret deodorant and the handy-dandy Lilliputian version of Listerine. Tiny bottles for the tiny criminal lurking within you.

But it’s not just California that has this inclination to mislead people about American responsibility for the assault on the environment.

Attending a meeting, I recently stayed at a major hotel chain in Washington, D.C. I arrived somewhat late the night before and was happy with the idea of ordering room service for dinner. Yet, there was no room service menu. I turned on the television to look for the digital version. Not there, either.

I called down to the front desk, and they informed me that in their commitment to being a green hotel chain and to help save the planet, they were using less paper and were no longer providing room service menus. They would, however, be happy to send someone up with a menu.

So here is a hotel that does not provide a room service menu because of the paper involved (you know, to save energy and consumption), but is willing to send a staff person to use an energy-guzzling elevator to deliver the piece of paper they did not provide. To save the planet. Got it.

After this Kafka-esque experience of ordering a hamburger, I get the one-page menu, order and finally there’s the “room service!” knock. I open the door and the porter has my food in a … paper bag.

Not on a tray, but yes, in a paper bag.

I ask him if there was a shortage of service trays. But no, I was informed this is how they deliver all their room service food … in paper bags. Indeed, the next morning as I left my room to attend the meeting, there are torn and used paper bags in front of other doors waiting for collection by the room service staff.

All I could do was laugh and hope George Orwell doesn’t mind becoming an adjective.

Here we have the bread and circus of “going green” — ridiculous virtue signaling that is not just irrelevant but absurd in the end. Asian nations continue to dump plastics into the ocean and now likely laugh as California, major hotel chains and politicians make fools of us all. It’s like being told to dance as someone shoots at your feet. And we dance and dance.

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Today’s Democrats have made sure that their constituency is prepared for and expects to be blamed for the world’s excesses. Americans are bad and selfish, we are told, and everything is our fault. The only difference? Everything is still our fault and now our hair won’t be clean.

As long as we allow the liberal machine to spread the lie that the American individual, and this country as a whole, is the problem in the world, despots and dictators in other nations will continue to have a field day turning the environment into a dumpster fire.

CLICK HERE TO READ MORE BY TAMMY BRUCE

THIS COLUMN ORIGINALLY APPEARED IN THE WASHINGTON TIMES

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