Bush's 7 Deadly Sins
1. Turning Mom Into a Superfund Site
A Bush proposal to weaken clean-air rules would put three times more mercury into our air and water than existing rules would allow. One in six women has enough mercury in her system to risk her kid having brain damage, mental retardation, blindness, seizures, and speech impediments. Not exactly friendly to the rights of the unborn, is it, George?
2. Belly Flop in a Cesspool
Nobody much likes sewage, except maybe sewer rats or those albino mutant lizards they say inhabit the pipes. So why did Bush, on his inauguration day, rescind a rule to cut down on sewage dumping? And then he goes from belly flop to flip-flop. First, Bush whacked a new regulation to reduce the arsenic in drinking water. A few months later--after a public outcry--he agreed to cut arsenic down to the same limits they have in Old Europe.
3. Playing With Fire
Bush touted his "Healthy Forests Initiative" as a way to stop catastrophic wildfires, but it actually allows more logging on 190 million acres--which could lead to bigger fires, because it lets timber companies cut the large trees that resist burning. He also claimed this would protect family homes, even when these trees are dozens of miles away, and when fire experts say the best way to keep a building from burning is to make a clearing around it, not in the next county.
Speaking of combustion, the United States burns through 20 million barrels of oil every day. But Bush's global-warming energy plan called for opening almost 70 million more acres to oil exploration.
4. Lying, Denying, Censoring, Cheating, and Other Misundemocratic Behavior
If global warming makes you nervous, well, ignore it. That's exactly what Bush's EPA did when it sliced a whole chapter on climate change from its 2002 annual report on pollution.
There was plenty of practice for denial and deletion, the most notorious case being just after the attack on the World Trade Center. The EPA found levels of asbestos and other pollution thousands of times above normal around the disaster site. But the White House ordered the agency to announce that it was safe.
Then Dick Cheney's energy task force refused to reveal what went on in its meetings--until the courts forced the Energy Department to cough up some of the records. The department even swiped $136,000 from its solar, renewable energy, and energy conservation budgets to produce 10,000 copies of the task force's drill-America-first report.
5. Coddling Criminals
A Texas-tough law-and-order guy, Bush executed 152 people while he was governor, and the state's prison population jumped 60 percent. Yet the first year he ran America, clean-air inspections fell off 30 percent, clean-water and clean-air criminal referrals declined by 50 percent, and criminal referrals for violations of rules controlling toxic substances dropped 80 percent.
6. Putting Polluters on Welfare
At the very heart of conservatism, compassionate or otherwise, is sturdy, all-American, bootstrap-grabbing self-reliance and responsibility. Therefore, you'd expect Bush to make big-time polluters shell out to fix their messes, also known as Superfund sites. (That's how the notorious Love Canal got cleaned up.) But Bush policy exempts the polluters from paying, so taxpayers will now foot the Superfund bill by themselves.
7. Flattening Teddy's Bears and Twain's Frogs
The Bush administration has weakened environmental protection on 234 million acres--as much as Teddy Roosevelt set aside. This means more logging, roadbuilding, mining, oil drilling--and the manly art of snowmobiling. To make it easier for snowmobilers, Bush's Forest Service proposed building a bridge to roar deeper into grizzly territory in Montana's Flathead National Forest. This was after he snuffed a ban on snowmobiles in Yellowstone and Grand Teton National Parks.
Bush even went after Mark Twain's celebrated jumping frog, yanking protection from 4 million acres of the California red-legged's habitat. He did protect 33,000 acres in Southern California for the kangaroo rat. But since these rodents are marvelously adapted to arid environments, it may be that he's just saving them for a role in desert warfare.