01:00 AM EST on Saturday, December 17, 2005

You'd think that with assorted bribery and other scandals on Capitol Hill, legislators would make an effort to keep things on the up and up. Still, the funny business continues.

Consider the effort by the Alliance to Protect Nantucket Sound, whose members include big national-campaign contributors, to get their friends in Congress to kill -- as quietly as possible -- the Nantucket Sound wind farm proposed by Cape Wind Associates.

Very responsive have been Massachusetts's Rep. William Delahunt and Sen. Edward Kennedy, and -- oddly -- Sen. John Warner, of Virginia. But wait, not oddly: Mr. Warner's daughters have summer houses in Osterville, the fancy Cape Cod village representing the core of wind-farm opposition -- wherein reigns (in warm weather) the senator's former stepmother-in-law, Rachel "Bunny" Mellon, the legendary socialite and a fierce wind-farm foe.

Yet there is also Rep. Don "Bridge-to-Nowhere" Young, the Alaskan porkmeister, who has been used in attempts to quash the wind farm. So far removed from Nantucket Sound, he shows a curious interest.

It's fine to oppose the wind farm; we can understand why some people wouldn't want to look at the turbines -- although many consider modern windmills beautiful. It's how the foes are trying to defeat the proposal that is reprehensible: via riders sneaked onto other legislation in closed hearings.

The wind-farm foes seem to fear an open debate about the wind-power proposal, which its backers say would provide about two-thirds of the electricity of the Cape and Islands, and decrease New England's dependence on fossil fuels.

The latest gambit -- courtesy of hard-working Congressman Young (What is the quid-pro-quo for his involvement in a matter so far from Alaska?) -- was to slide into an $8.7 billion Coast Guard authorization bill language that would prohibit wind turbines within 1 1/2 miles of shipping and ferry lines.

Consider: Oil and gas rigs -- which, unlike windmills, involve lots of flammable material -- can be sited within 500 feet of a shipping lane! In addition, wind turbines stand a quarter-mile from shipping channels into Copenhagen: scene of far more traffic than Nantucket Sound.

Meanwhile, the Alliance to Protect Nantucket Sound and its Capitol Hill servants have dragged in outdated British concerns about windmill interference with ships' radar within 500 yards of turbines. Any port in a storm . . .

Finally, the Coast Guard already has the authority to decide whether the wind-farm proposal is too close for safety.

In short, this is all just another in a long line of stealth attempts by a favored few to deep-six -- through public policy -- a project they find not particularly to their liking. Looking from their summer houses, or their summer yachts, they do not care to see windmills twirling over their Nantucket Sound. Many in this group spend their winters fashionably away -- in sunny places facing no energy crisis, such as New England's. They need not personally worry about heat and light.

This war on wind power for all citizens hardly exemplifies representative democracy.