George W. Bush will go down in history as America's worst environmental president. [Editorial Opinion]



In a ferocious three-year attack [Editorial Opinion],



the Bush administration has initiated more than 200 major rollbacks of America's environmental laws [Unsubstantiated], weakening the protection of our country's air, water, public lands and wildlife [Editorial Opinion].



Cloaked in meticulously crafted language designed to deceive the public, the administration intends to eliminate the nation's most important environmental laws by the end of the year [Inflammatory Editorial Opinion].



Under the guidance of Republican pollster Frank Luntz, the Bush White House has actively hidden its anti-environmental program behind deceptive rhetoric, telegenic spokespeople, secrecy and the intimidation of scientists and bureaucrats. [Unsubstantiated]



The Bush attack was not entirely unexpected. [Editorial Opinion]



George W. Bush had the grimmest environmental record of any governor during his tenure in Texas. Texas became number one in air and water pollution and in the release of toxic chemicals. In his six years in Austin, he championed a short-term pollution-based prosperity, which enriched his political contributors and corporate cronies by lowering the quality of life for everyone else. [Unsubstantiated]



Now President Bush is set to do the same to America. After three years, his policies are already bearing fruit, diminishing standards of living for millions of Americans. [Inflammatory and Unsubstantiated]





I am angry both as a citizen and a father. Three of my sons have asthma, [No reason given for the asthma, trying to imply it is because of Bush’s bad policies]



and I watch them struggle to breathe on bad-air days. [Does Rob Kennedy Jr. live in TX so that he can blame his sons’ asthma on Bush?]



And they're comparatively lucky: One in four African-American children in New York shares this affliction [Unsubtantiated]; their suffering is often unrelieved because they lack the insurance and high-quality health care that keep my sons alive. [More editorializing, attacking Bush about healthcare problems that Clinton promised to solve but could not in eight years! What does health insurance have to do with Environmental Issues? Nothing unless you want more inflammatory remarks to add to your column.]



My kids are among the millions of Americans who cannot enjoy the seminal American experience of fishing locally with their dad and eating their catch. Most freshwater fish in New York and all in Connecticut are now under consumption advisories. [So the millions of Americans who DO fish and eat their catch are all dying of mercury poisoning? I hadn’t noticed.—In other words, Unsubtantiated]



A main source of mercury pollution in America, as well as asthma-provoking ozone and particulates, is the coal-burning power plants that President Bush recently excused from complying with the Clean Air Act. [Unsubtantiated]





Furthermore, the deadly addiction to fossil fuels that White House policies encourage has squandered our treasury, entangled us in foreign wars, diminished our international prestige, made us a target for terrorist attacks and increased our reliance on petty Middle Eastern dictators who despise democracy and are hated by their own people. [The author fails to note that it is the environmentalists that fight so hard against harvesting the oil in our own country that make us more dependent on foreign oil. And terrorism has nothing to do with the environment, but he tries valiantly to link the two and blame Bush for terrorism that has been ongoing for decades.]





When the Republican right managed to install George W. Bush as president in 2000, movement leaders once again set about doing what they had attempted to do since the Reagan years: eviscerate the infrastructure of laws and regulations that protect the environment. For twenty-five years it has been like the zombie that keeps coming back from the grave. [Editorial Opinion]





The attacks began on Inauguration Day, when President Bush's chief of staff and former General Motors lobbyist Andrew Card quietly initiated a moratorium on all recently adopted regulations. [Unsubstantiated]



Since then, the White House has enlisted every federal agency that oversees environmental programs in a coordinated effort to relax rules aimed at the oil, coal, logging, mining and chemical industries as well as automakers, real estate developers, corporate agribusiness and other industries. [Unsubstantiated]





Bush's Environmental Protection Agency has halted work on sixty-two environmental standards, the federal Department of Agriculture has stopped work on fifty-seven standards, and the Occupational Safety and Health Administration has halted twenty-one new standards. The EPA completed just two major rules -- both under court order and both watered down at industry request -- compared to twenty-three completed by the Clinton administration and fourteen by the Bush Sr. administration in their first two years. [Unsubstantiated]





This onslaught [Editorial] is being coordinated through the White House Office of Management and Budget -- or, more precisely, OMB's Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs, under the direction of John Graham, the engine-room mechanic [Editorial] of the Bush stealth strategy [Editorial].



Graham's specialty is promoting changes in scientific and economic assumptions that underlie government regulations -- such as recalculating cost-benefit analyses to favor polluters. Before coming to the White House, Graham was the founding director of the Harvard Center for Risk Analysis, where he received funding from America's champion corporate polluters: Dow Chemical, DuPont, Monsanto, Alcoa, Exxon, General Electric and General Motors. [Inflammatory Editorial Opinion]





Under the White House's guidance, the very agencies entrusted to protect Americans from polluters are laboring to destroy environmental laws. [Editorial Opinion]



Or they've simply stopped enforcing them. [Editorial Opinion]



Penalties imposed for environmental violations have plummeted under Bush. [No reason given for the decrease in penalties; author is assuming but not proving negative implications]



The EPA has proposed eliminating 270 enforcement staffers, which would drop staff levels to the lowest level ever. Inspections of polluting businesses have dipped fifteen percent. Criminal cases referred for federal prosecution have dropped forty percent. [No reason given for these decreases, assuming negative implications]



The EPA measures its success by the amount of pollution reduced or prevented as a result of its own actions. [Meaningless statement]



Last year, the EPA's two most senior career enforcement officials resigned after decades of service. They cited the administration's refusal to carry out environmental laws. [Another meaningless statement. “Decades of service” would imply that they made it through those “horrific” Reagan years and should be able to survive what they know will be a temporary situation under Bush. No real reason is given for their resignation, nor is their resignation even relevant to the discussion.]





The White House has masked its attacks with euphemisms that would have embarrassed George Orwell. [Editorial Opinion]



George W. Bush's "Healthy Forests" initiative promotes destructive logging of old-growth forests. His "Clear Skies" program, which repealed key provisions of the Clean Air Act, allows more emissions. The administration uses misleading code words such as streamlining or reforming instead of weakening, and thinning instead of logging. [Editorial and Unsubstantiated]

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