...I'm okay with being REALITY-based.




Friday, June 20, 2003
      ( 10:59 AM )
 
The (Dirty) World According to Bush

Remember how the Nixon Whitehouse had a secret section called "The Plumbers," a group of men whose job it was to plug leaks and take care of those who made things difficult for the president? Well, it seems that the Bush Whitehouse has its own secret section, which I will call "The Doctors." Their sole job seems to be to doctor reports and information to make actual studies and intelligence completely different from the facts so that in the end they agree with BushCo's position on things, along with the position of its corporate backers.

Case in point: Yesterday, the New York Times reported on the fact that the EPA was going to release a report next week on the state of the Environment. However, it was not going to be in its original form because the White House had taken its little red pen to the report and virtually anhilated the meat of the report so that it doesn't appear humans have anything to do with global warming or the destruction of the environment.

And not only did they "edit" the report for the EPA, The Doctors added their own little tidbits:

The editing eliminated references to many studies
concluding that warming is at least partly caused by
rising concentrations of smokestack and tail-pipe
emissions and could threaten health and ecosystems.

Among the deletions were conclusions about the likely
human contribution to warming from a 2001 report on
climate by the National Research Council that the White
House had commissioned and that President Bush had
endorsed in speeches that year. White House officials
also deleted a reference to a 1999 study showing that
global temperatures had risen sharply in the previous decade
compared with the last 1,000 years. In its place, administration
officials added a reference to a new study, partly financed
by the American Petroleum Institute, questioning that conclusion.

Then following the article in the NY Times, Sen. John Edwards and several other Sentators released a statement that said they had written to the President about the situation and wanted to investigate the doctoring of the report, especially the financial influence of the American Petroleum Institute (motto: "how did our oil get under their sand?").

Said the statement:

"If these reports are accurate, your administration
has done a serious disservice not only to the hard
working professionals at the EPA, but also to the
American people," the senators said in a letter to the
president.

I keep thinking when something like this happens that it's the last straw and American citizens simply won't stand for it anymore. Yet BushCo keeps on ticking away. So far, I can't see any other American media outlets picking up on this story, except for AP. Of course, the Brits have got it covered.

I wonder if the Bush 2004 Campaign can add this motto: "Ruining the Word -- One Day at a Time."

Wake up America.

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