Propose a law or government regulation aimed at protecting the environment, and it's a safe bet that the right-wing media will respond by blasting intrusive “nanny state” policies that tell people how to live instead of letting them decide for themselves, and insisting that if people really care about the environment, the glorious free market will take care of it.

When Washington DC, for example, instituted a plastic bag tax designed to reduce number of bags clogging local rivers and streams, the good folks at Fox News denounced the measure as “downright ridiculous.”

Now, I don't tend to agree with the claims that the free market will take care of all of our problems, or that the government discouraging the use of environmentally-destructive products is an unbearable infringement on individual liberty. But at least those positions are understandable. They don't (necessarily) indicate a hatred for the planet.

But what happens when the market provides environmentally-friendly products, and individuals make the decision to purchase those products? The right heaps derision upon them.

Just this morning, Glenn Beck & Co. mocked reusable grocery bags. Not, mind you, governmentally-mandated reusable grocery bags -- the bags themselves, and the people who use them. See, “real men” don't use them; they use “as much plastic as possible.”

Then there's the Toyota Prius. For some reason, conservative media figures are blinded by rage whenever they encounter a Prius.

Prius-bashing is a popular pastime among the Newsbusters crowd. Take this weird rant by Media Research Center Vice President Brent Baker last week:

Confirming her membership in Manhattan's liberal elite, Katie Couric boasted on Tuesday's Late Show that she plans to follow Tom Friedman's admonition, that in refusing to move away from oil “we have met the enemy and he is us,” and so she's realized she “should” buy a Toyota Prius, the favorite of conspicuously superior liberals, or at least a hybrid. Couric recounted how her daughter told her "'we should turn in the car we have' and 'get a Prius or a hybrid.' And I said, 'you know, Ellie, we should do that.' And we're going to look into it."

What the heck? Did a Prius run over Brent Bozell's dog? What's wrong with a private citizen deciding she should buy a fuel-efficient car?

National Review's Greg Pollowitz and Jonah Goldberg, among others, seem to delight at Prius-bashing, too.

I'm starting to think the right-wing media doesn't love free markets so much as they hate the environment. How else to explain their gleeful mockery of individual decisions to use reusable plastic bags and drive fuel-efficient cars?