Saturday, 9 August 2003 - 10:02 AM CDT
Name:
As Al Gore noted...
That's what happened, for example, when Vice President Cheney invited all those oil and gas industry executives to meet in secret sessions with him and his staff to put their wish list into the administration's legislative package in early 2001. That group wanted to get rid of the Kyoto treaty on global warming, of course, and the administration pulled out of it first thing.
Now, the list of people who helped to write our nation's new environmental and energy policies is secret. And the vice president won't say whether or not his former company, Halliburton, was included. But, of course, as practically everybody in the world knows now, Halliburton was given a huge open-ended contract to take over and run the Iraqi oil fields without having to bid against any other companies.
Second problem: When leaders make up their minds on a policy without ever having to answer hard questions about whether or not it's good or bad for the American people as a whole, they can pretty quickly get into situations where it's uncomfortable to defend what they've done with simple and truthful explanations. That's when they're tempted to fuzz up the facts and create those false impressions. And when other facts start to come out that undermine the impressions they're trying to maintain, they try to keep the truth bottled up if they can or distort it.
For example, a couple of weeks ago, the White House ordered its own EPA to strip important scientific information about the dangers of global warming out of a public report. Instead, the White House substituted information that was partly paid for by the American Petroleum Institute.
This week, to use another example, analysts at the Treasury Department told a journalist that they're now being routinely ordered to change their best analysis of what the consequences of the Bush tax laws are likely to be for the average person.
So here's the pattern that I see, linking all this together.
The president's mishandling of, and selective use of, the best evidence available on the threat posed by Iraq is pretty much the same as the way he intentionally distorted the best available evidence on climate change and rejected the best available evidence on the threat posed to America's economy by his tax and budget proposals.
In each case, the president seems to have been pursuing policies chosen well in advance of the facts that were designed to benefit friends and supporters, and has then used tactics that deprived the American people of any opportunity to effectively subject his arguments to the kind of informed scrutiny essential in our system of checks and balances.
The administration has developed a highly effective propaganda machine to embed in the public mind mythologies that grow out of the one central doctrine that all of the special interests agree on. Which, in its purest form, is that government is very bad and should be done away with as much as possible, except the parts of it that redirect money through big contracts to industries that have won their way into the inner circle.
on fire