Whitman admits giving up the fight

[question everything]

Whitman: Republican for the environment

February 24, 2005

(snip)

Meanwhile, the Bush administration pushes what it calls a "Clear Skies" initiative. A feel-happy label, this, for gutting a clean-air law that's been on the books some 60 years. They're performing a favor, some say, to corporate polluters regularly mucking up the American skyline. And Senate leaders have resorted to some truly strong-arm tactics to scare off any who would stand in the way.

If Washington has seen anything to top this since the McCarthy years, it escaped my attention. Two highly respected spokesmen for anti-pollution organizations serving state and local governments of all 50 states testified recently before the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee. They came down hard against renewed administration efforts to emasculate controls over industrial emissions.

(snip)

The response? Committee chairman Sen. James Inhofe, R-Okla., soon thereafter called on the witnesses to provide their organizations' membership lists and financial records. (Quasi-public organizations, let it be noted.)

Intimidation? Oh no, said an aide to Inhofe. "If we'd wanted to intimidate them, we'd have done it before they testified."

The one person who might have checked government's assault on all outdoors – our recently resigned Environmental Protection Agency administrator, Christine Todd Whitman – admits giving up the fight. She's even written a book telling how she got rolled. "It's My Party Too" provides the story line for a lost cause. From its start, the Bush team's environmental record has read like an all-points bulletin for the Boston Strangler. It tells of continued concessions to the auto industry, ever more logging and grazing of public lands, abandonment of pristine coastlines and endless forays against the Alaskan wilderness.

(snip)


To be blunt, Whitman was used. Her well-cataloged list of disappointments in Bush sounds sadly familiar. She seems a reincarnation of White House counsel John Dean in the months before Watergate. Worse, she emulates every battered housewife with a smiling pretense that the lout with whiskey on his breath is really a caring husband.

(snip)


Find this article at:
http://www.signonsandiego.com/uniontrib/20050224/news_lz1e24deerlin.html

[yellowcanine]

1. Too late for Christie to make amends. She drank the Koolaid when it

suited her so now she can just shut up.

[ginnyinWI]

2. That is just plain mean!

I applaud her for coming out with a book and coming clean on what happened. It takes guts to go against this band of thugs. Real guts.

[Skittles]

3. yellowcanine is correct

she played the bush whore a long time - for chrissakes, she is a republican and we all know where they stand on environmental issues

[WyLoochka]

7. She didn't "go against"

the thugs when it might have helped thwart at least some of the wreckage the black hearts obviously had in mind when she signed onto their team.

ONLY Jim Jeffords had the "guts to go against this band of thugs" when it counted and in a way that made a difference.

The rest of the so-called moderate Republicans are wimps and traitors.

[DulceDecorum]

4. One by one, they all walk the plank

Then they all seem so very surpised and hurt
at the idea that it could
and did happen to them.

[adigal]

5. Whitman lied about the air quality at the WTC

causing thousands of people to have permanent lung problems and God only knows what else down the road.

Hell has a special place for all of the people.

[The Zanti Regent]

6. another GOP Whore

She took the money and ran. F YOU PRISSY TODD CLUELESS!

[OETKB]

8. Returning the Favor

When anyone of any stature in the opposition shows reasonable policy in any field, especially if it is something we agree with, it is time to flaunt it. This is the modus operandi of the other side a la Zell Miller, John Breaux, etc. At least Ms. Whitman carries some legitamacy with her. She might even convince some "moderate Republicans" to pull a Democratic lever. One can dream, can't we?