And to think I was bothered when Sens. Manchin and Capito just had to take a swipe at President Obama’s environmental regulations on the day when the administration made good on a promise to pump some money into helping coalfield communities figure out what comes next.

But wow. Hoppy Kercheval’s “commentary” today is really something. Maybe he should have waited for tomorrow’s traditional “steam release” segment to go on this rant about yesterday’s announcement of nearly $40 million in federal grants to coalfield communities and groups. Here’s what he wrote, under the headline, “Obama’s handout to coal country“:

… There is also a “blood money” feel to it, a payoff from the Obama administration to ease consciences over the damage done, handouts spread throughout the region to tamp down the misery index the White House helped create.

Blood money? Wonder why he put it in quotes? So he can pretend it wasn’t really him saying it? Who knows with Hoppy. He long ago went so round the bend about coal issues, climate change and President Obama that it’s hard to know whether even he believes what he says and writes.

You have to start with the headline, and Hoppy’s use of the word “handout.” It’s surely not by accident that Hoppy’s playing into the false notion that the administration’s Power Plus Plan is some sort of welfare — checks written to unemployed miners, rather than seed money to help local communities find ways to diversify their economies and communities for long-term success.

Then there’s Hoppy’s single-minded insistence that what’s happening in the coalfields is caused almost exclusively by government regulations. To try to avoid being accused of ignoring the facts, Hoppy makes a brief feint toward acknowledging the role of cheap natural gas. But in the end, Hoppy doesn’t tell the truth on these issues, because he ignores the long-standing warnings that someday the good coal was going to run out, that even a defeat of EPA wouldn’t save the Southern West Virginia mining industry, and that global warming is a major threat to human society — and a significant contributor to disasters like the June floods.

Not for nothing, but it’s worth pointing out here that while Hoppy crusades in favor of returning coal to its supposed heyday, Hoppy hasn’t exactly focused his attention over the years on the many downsides of our state’s relationship with coal:  Slurry dam disasters, mine explosion disasters, black lung disasters … or on the very real legacy liabilities that Hoppy’s as-few-regulations-as-possible philosophy have allowed to now be foisted on our state, like underfunded coal miner pension plans and giant messes left behind when the mountaintop removal is done.

Maybe the best thing to say about this from Hoppy is that at least he’s consistent — consistent at getting this story wrong, obfuscating the truth and just carrying the water of a powerful industry whose warts he likes to ignore. But then again, he’s not really consistent.

It wasn’t so long ago that Hoppy was complaining when the Obama administration didn’t give West Virginia some of this “blood money.” In January, his column was headlined, “WV thumped by Obama green agenda yet again,” and objected when the federal government rejected the state’s request for $140 million from a program meant to help communities become more resilient to the kinds of natural disasters — floods, hurricanes, etc., — expected to become more likely and more damaging because of climate change. Hoppy explained:

The proposal was called “Adjust, Adapt and Advance,” and it included detailed plans for water, sewer and infrastructure improvements, land use planning that lowered risks to the environment, and housing, school and business developments on old surface mine sites that would be out of the flood plain.

So yeah, it’s “blood money.” But if Hoppy can use the rejection of a state grant for some more of that unseemly stuff to attack the “Obama green agenda,” then logic and reason and any sort of consistency go out the window.

What Hoppy didn’t make clear was that most of the money the state requested  in that earlier application — $110 million of it — was to be used for the last part of that, the development of old surface mine sites.

Hoppy writes that the “irony is self-evident” in President Obama providing money to help struggling coal communities. Really, though, Hoppy is a bit irony impaired on all of this. What’s really ironic is the whole idea that now that the mountains have been blown up, the streams polluted, and the riches of the coal hauled away to some other place, we have to invest public resources to make those flattened mountains into someplace businesses might locate, schools might be built, and families might be able to live.

I don’t know about you, but I remember the constant jingoism from coal supporters that mountaintop removal was good because when the mining companies were done there would be something valuable left over. And what’s really ironic is that the whole reason we don’t have more development on former mountaintop removal sites is that the anti-regulatory forces championed by Hoppy kept the portions of the federal surface mining act that required such development from being properly enforced.

And finally, really, what’s ironic is that the mess West Virginia is in now is largely of our own making. It’s a creature of our relationship with coal, our reliance on one industry, and our refusal to heed decades of warnings that we needed to branch out and get ready for this day. And commentators like Hoppy want to make it so that the Obama administration is damned if they don’t help us out of this hole, but also damned if they do help us out of it.