We’re so used to hearing Orwellian, Alice-in-Wonderland, down-is-up, black-is-white rhetoric from our current administration that we don’t even notice it anymore. But the rest of the world still has the capacity to be shocked by the Bush administration’s mendacity, as James Connaughton, the leader of the U.S. delegation at the Bali climate change conference, discovered today.

Connaughton, representing the one industrialized nation that has refused to sign the Kyoto Protocol despite being the world’s number one emitter of greenhouse gases, laid the blame for inaction on climate change on, well, everybody else. “We are leading and we will continue to lead but that requires the rest of the world to fall in line and follow,” he said”a statement which, according to the TimesOnline, drew “audible gasps.”

Al Gore, by contrast, drew cheers from the same crowd shortly thereafter when he directly contradicted Connaughton:

“I am going to speak an inconvenient truth: my own country, the United States, is principally responsible for obstructing progress here in Bali.”

European Union leaders at the conference are, in fact, so frustrated by the U.S. delegation’s refusal to consider mandatory guidelines for cuts in greenhouse gas emissions that they’re threatening to boycott Bush’s own “Major Economies Meeting on Energy” to be held in Honolulu next month.

The agenda for the U.S. meeting will consist of discussing nationally determined, voluntary cutbacks with 16 major economies, including European countries, Japan, China and India. In other words, the U.S. wants each country to be able to decide for itself just how much–or how little–it wants to do to about global warming.

Given the urgency of the climate change crisis, America’s insistence on voluntary cuts just ain’t gonna cut it. If Connaughton thinks the rest of the world is going to “fall in line” and follow us to extinction, he and his boss, the Decider, will be decidedly disappointed.