Obama may be a smoother talker than any of us could have imagined. The appointment of Roemer, a Democrat in name only, as ambassador to growing superpower India should be shocking to lefties and even moderates. So far, not a peep out of environmentalists about what you would think would be a controversial appointment to one of the world's biggest and most important countries.

Unless they've forgotten the furor in 2004 when the Wall Street Journal revealed the major role the tiny Mercatus Center (largely funded by the oil and gas industry) played in helping George W. Bush dismantle EPA rules and other government regulations on business and industry.

Go back and re-read the WSJ story, "Rule Breaker: In Washington, Tiny Think Tank Wields Big Stick on Regulation":

Now, five years later, Obama's crew House has spun the truth clean out of this, describing Mercatus — the bane of the EPA — this way in the White House's mini-biography of Roemer in the official notice of his appointment:

Mercatus is regularly described by environmentalists as evil. The Clean Air Trust, for example, described Mercatus during the Bush Era as "an increasingly influential, anti-regulatory 'think tank' created by and subsidized by polluter money." That was in 2002, when the Clean Air Trust named former Enron board member Wendy Lee Gramm, the director of the Mercatus "regulatory studies program," as its "Villain of the Month." (Gramm is the wife of fanatical anti-regulator ex-senator Phil Gramm, who played a major role in abolishing the protections of the Glass-Steagall Act.)

Wendy Gramm's successor at Mercatus was Susan Dudley, who later became an important official at Bush's Office of Management and Budget (a highly controversial move at the time), where she personally pressured the EPA to ignore ozone standards.

In July 2006, during the furor over Dudley's recess appointment to an OMB job in which she was the person who had the power to approve all environmental, health, safety and other regulations, the Washington Post's Al Kamen noted the power of Mercatus's recommendations:

Roemer, a former congressman and member of the 9/11 Commission, has been described as a "moderate Democrat," but that doesn't seem applicable any longer, given his role with Mercatus, which was such a darling of the Bush regime.

Not to mention that Roemer is also affiliated with the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, a hard-line pro-Israel lobby where Paul Wolfowitz was a board member before Bush and Dick Cheney installed him in the Pentagon.

Roemer seems like a perverse pick (except for a conservative Republican regime) to be the U.S. envoy to India, site of such monumental environmental disasters as Bhopal — and of Delhi itself, which is the world's second most polluted city.

On the other hand, he's not likely to piss off India's leaders by urging them, as their country continues to grow into a mighty industrial power, to fight pollution and regulate industry and business.