Flimflam president
Just as most Americans don’t believe former President
Bill Clinton pardoned billionaire fugitive Marc Rich "on the
merits," neither do thinking Americans buy President Bush’s lame
explanation for breaking his promise to regulate carbon dioxide emissions
from power plants.
He changed his mind, he insists, because of the
"unexpected" California electricity shortfall and impending
energy cost increases.
Only those who believe in the Tooth Fairy will swallow
that.
It wasn’t but a few days later that Bush announced he
might open up monument lands to oil drilling, which parallels his pledge
to open the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to drilling.
What’s happening is this: Bush is abandoning the faux
environmentalist image he concocted during the campaign to mute critics,
and is repaying cronies in coal and petroleum lobbies who poured millions
into his campaign.
His claim that the so-called electricity crisis and
impending energy cost increases caught him unaware is tissue-thin deceit.
How odd this president can clairvoyantly predict with
utter certainty the amount of the U.S. surplus in 2010 and write a tax cut
that he flawlessly calls "just right," but couldn’t anticipate
developments in the energy business in which he spent his life?
Even the beribboned retired Gen. Colin Powell, once
courted for the presidency and now Bush’s secretary of State, and former
New Jersey Gov. Christine Todd Whitman, his Environmental Protection
Agency administrator, have been callously humiliated by Bush flimflamming.
After Whitman assured Americans that Bush wouldn’t
abandon his carbon dioxide promise, she was slapped in the face by Bush’s
broken pledge. And after Powell testified in Congress that he’d resume
talks with North Korea where the Clinton White House left off, Bush
chopped Powell off at the knees by saying no such talks would be held.
For good measure, Bush also gave America’s most loyal
ally, Great Britain, a rude awakening: He informed Prime Minister Blair
that the U.S. tradition of hands-on international broker is on hold.
In 61 days since taking office, Bush has quickly taught
his Cabinet, American voters and overseas leaders alike to take the Bush
White House’s word with skepticism.
Big as Texas is, it obviously couldn’t produce a big
thinker as our 43rd president.