It's been a tough time for those of us who think that honest debate still plays an important role in our public life. We've witnessed, it's said, "the end of ideology," the death of the unthinking passions that forever tarnished the 20th century. Yet, the daily news is replete with breathtakingly incomprehensible public policies that belie claims that ours is an age of sober reason.

Greg Miller is an American soldier who suffered a massive facial wound while serving in our nation's anti-terror campaign in Afghanistan. His jaw had to be wired shut. In such cases, it's a medical necessity to travel with a pair of wire cutters. Should something lodge in the throat, the jaw has to be rapidly freed or the patient will suffocate.

When Miller tried to board a plane from San Francisco last week, however, eagle-eyed airport security pounced on the wire cutters. Despite his military service, obvious medical condition and his repeated explanations, they refused to allow him to take his life saving implement on the aircraft. Miller had to risk his life just to fly home.

How did we make a terrorist suspect of an anti-terror war hero? By pretending, in the name of political correctness, that everyone is equally likely to hijack a jet and fly it into a skyscraper. "Americans," mused an Israeli security expert, "look for weapons. We look for terrorists." Or, as a right wing writer wryly observed, in an American airport it's "better [to be] dead than rude."

Small wonder that airline and airport executives finally went public with the hardly shocking news that America's ballooning costly air travel security system was largely ineffective. A left wing New York Times columnist was even moved to note that young Arab men, for example, were more likely to blow things up under the guise of religious fanaticism than, say, a roomful of nuns.

But nothing seems likely to change. "It really annoyed me," said Miller about his ordeal, after safely deplaning in Texas. "Like I'm going to do something to the aircraft...." Countless millions of travelers can look forward to be similarly aggravated for no good reason.

Then came news of a report setting forth, for the first time, the Bush Administration's position on global warming. Climate change is a pretty complex topic. Much remains unclear or in dispute. Nevertheless, it's possible to articulate at least two reasonably coherent positions from all the hullabaloo.

One is to assume, as do most media, academics and environmental organizations, that human fossil fuel emissions are pumping massive amounts of carbon dioxide into the air and rapidly driving up the earth's temperature. All of this will provoke catastrophic droughts, rising sea levels, super energized and destructive storms and searing summer heat.

Given these consequences, it's imperative to launch massive programs to reduce greenhouse emissions and curb, if not reverse, the harmful atmospheric changes we're tragically causing.

Alternatively, it's possible to agree with the minority of academics, most industrial unions and manufacturing industries, political conservatives and, of course, SUV drivers that if the earth is warming -- and some say even that's not clear -- any such trend is due to natural, non-human factors. For reasons we don't understand, and certainly beyond our control, climate can shift quite dramatically. Witness, for instance, the geologically recent ice age or the rapid warming observed on Mars.

Whatever people do, the alternative theory goes, has only a minute effect on the earth's weather. It's not worth destroying our economy, let alone forcing everyone to drive some descendant of the Yugo, to lower carbon dioxide or other harmful emissions.

Remarkably, the Bush camp chose to embrace both of these options.

In a report quietly published on the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency's website last week, and only later ballyhooed in the media, it concluded that human fossil fuel emissions are, in fact, warming our world. This would lead, it predicted, to the loss of rare, biologically important Rocky Mountain meadow and coastal wetland habitats and much hotter heat waves. Snowmelt, and thus critical water supplies in areas like the western U.S., would also be endangered.

So human-generated global warming is a big-time reality. Needless to say, that's scary stuff. And what does the White House propose to do about it?

Nothing. Climate change, the Bush report also asserts, is irreversible. It's the product of decades of carbon dioxide and other air pollution throughout the industrial age. Some warming may even be good for us and allow for longer growing seasons or milder winters in currently colder climes.

Live with it, the report urges. No need to change much of anything. Just make sure your car has lots of air conditioning.

When news of this bizarre posture first broke, some observers speculated it was an exercise in political triangulation, an attempt to appeal to both sides of the global warming debate. Perhaps the former Clinton regime, a master of the art, could have pulled this off. But Bush's astonishingly contradictory report proved a spectacular, utterly predictable failure.

Global warming activists quite properly savaged the illogic of conceding that humans are causing warmer temperatures yet refusing to do anything to change their behavior. Even if the previous decades' damage could not be undone, they argued, why compound the crisis by pumping even more harmful gases into the earth's already beleaguered atmosphere? What did Bush think would happen several decades from now if future carbon dioxide emissions weren't controlled as soon as possible?

Bush's conservative base was equally apoplectic. Handing the political left the moral high ground on climate change, they worried, was a colossal miscalculation. How could anyone justify big cars, Alaskan or offshore drilling, or new power plants and factories if the President himself believed these activities put the very air we breathe and water we drink at risk?

Columnists have to believe that logic and persuasion can affect public discourse. When thousands of federal security workers are forced in the name of "fairness" to wand grandmothers flying to see their kids, or our top political leaders simultaneously concede and then try to ignore a highly contentious climate problem, some weeks it's just plain hard to keep the faith.