Bad Astronomy

Bush political hackery puts kids at risk

In previous post, a commenter took me (and by proxy, Chris Mooney) to task for not providing citations in accusations of political hackery of the Bush Administration. That’s a fair cop, so I will elaborate.

I have many examples of such behavior by the White House in this blog, including the hackalicious George Deutsch, who tried to undermine science at NASA. A search on his name will provide spectacular examples of how this Bush demagogue ham-fistedly tried to insert religion into NASA.

Looking around the web, I found another fine example. Bush has undermined regulations to make it harder to put lead in children’s toys and lunchboxes. Lunchboxes! That article has citations and quotations from experts. Bush has repeatedly and with malice aforethought put incompetent lobbying boobs into positions of not only power, but also where their incompetence or shilling for corporations has put people in direct risk.

Or how about the guy who’s going to oversee the investigation of the recent Utah mine disaster? Richard Stickler is the Mine and Health Safety Administrator, and when he was a mine executive, his mines had twice the national average of accidents. Guess what? Bush appointee. In fact, he was a recess appointment, since Bush couldn’t get this guy past even the Republican congressmen.

Remember Katrina? Heckuva job, Brownie. Or do a search on how the EPA is doing. Or General Petraeus’s surge report. Or how the White House created “’asset deployment’ meetings held to discuss the use of federal resources to promote the reelection of President Bush and Republicans in Congress” (which is very, very illegal). Or the Undersecretary of Natural Resources and Environment, Mark Rey, who was a former logging industry lobbyist and who is now under fire for allowing the Forestry Service to dump a flame retardant on a fire that killed up to 20,000 fish in Oregon in 2003, and also for blocking a review of that event by a court of law.

Had enough?

Sure, I’m a scientist, and I make it known when I think science is under attack. But this White House, this Administration, George Bush, is destroying far more than just science. He’s killing all of us, and it really seems to me that he cares far more about who gave him money and who can help him consolidate his power as unitary executive than who can do a good job.

And don’t give me that static about “every President does it”. Every President does not. I refer you again to this article where Clinton appointed a consumer advocate as head of the Consumer Product Safety Commission.

Someone who cared for people over corporations? Quelle damage! And in this current Administration, quelle impossible.