'West Virginia will not shy away from this battle against Obama’s EPA'

Suspending disbelief can be fun when you’re reading a book or watching a movie, but in real life it’s asking for trouble. In real life, it’s best not to invite ape-like forest creatures into your home, do choreography with syncopated sociopaths, or have intimate relations with the undead.

Ignoring obvious dangers and giving the benefit of the doubt to politicians who threaten our economic life is plain foolish.

Why do we keep doing it?

When President Obama first ran for the office he’s held now for five years, he promised to regulate the coal industry to death. Once elected, he set out to do just that, encouraging his minions at the Environmental Protection Agency to deny, revoke, or slow-walk mining permits and to issue unachievable emissions standards.

He told us ahead of time that he would do this, but we acted as if he didn’t mean it. Then he did what he said he would do, and we pretended that he hadn’t really meant to, that it was some kind of mistake or accident, that the predictable adverse consequences were somehow unintended -- or whatever bad excuse of an explanation we could come up with to avoid facing the obvious truth.

Which is this: President Obama is doing just what he said he would do, regulating the coal industry to death. If we continue to delude ourselves about what he’s doing (and said he would do) and allow him to keep doing it, we have no one but ourselves to blame.

State Attorney General Patrick Morrisey seems to understand this. He denounced the EPA’s latest proposed emission rules, warning that they would effectively ban new coal-fired power plants. And so they would.

“West Virginia cannot idly sit by and allow politicians and bureaucrats in Washington, D.C., to cripple our economy,” Morrisey declared. “West Virginia will not shy away from this battle against Obama’s EPA.”

Morrisey is right. We must face facts. We must fight back.