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Editorials
For the week of March 21 through 27, 2001

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.

 

 

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Copyright © 2001 Express Publishing Inc. All Rights reserved. Reproduction in whole or in part in any form or medium without express written permission of Express Publishing Inc. is prohibited.