Raw Fisher's Half-Baked Attack

You know the world's gone topsy-turvy when The Green Miles is coming to the defense of Wal-Mart. Maybe I'm still in the Christmas spirit because I'm wearing the nice green shirt The Green Mom got me for Christmas?

Marc Fisher is one of my favorite columnists (next to fellow Fall River, MA native and fellow bleeding heart EJ Dionne), but his blog post today couldn't be more off-base:

Wal-Mart, the company that lefties, urbanites and greens love to hate, is repositioning itself as a friend of the environment: The retail behemoth has announced its intention to sell 100 million of those compact fluorescent light bulbs that cost an arm and a leg to buy, but save lots of energy (and therefore cut your electric bill.)

This will not work, for one simple reason: The bulbs provide only the illusion of light. We shelled out the big bucks--the things cost upwards of ten times the price of cheap but energy-hogging incandescent bulbs--for a bunch of different so-called swirl bulbs and actually lived with the things for a couple of months before, finally, we all realized that we were straining to read, straining to do anything that required what a good old 60-watt Sylvania provides with total reliability.

The propagandists behind the compact fluorescents claim that the new swirl bulbs are every bit as bright, warm and user-friendly as the cheap bulbs that have served Americans for the better part of a century. These folks are--how to put this--wrong.

I don't "love to hate" Wal-Mart. (For the record, I love to hate Paris Hilton.) I support their compact fluorescent effort, and I wish Wal-Mart would take more simple, low-cost steps to minimize its environmental impact. In an age when even the Pentagon is going green, Wal-Mart remains years behind.

I also love to hate critics who make six figures complaining about paying $3 for light bulbs.

And how can a light bulb not be user-friendly? How many Post columnists does it take to screw in a light bulb?

Fisher is already getting ripped in his comments section. Please join in!

UPDATE: Of the 37 comments filed right now, I only count three that support Fisher's position on this. Go, greens, go!