{"id":15991,"date":"2008-06-25T10:40:49","date_gmt":"2008-06-25T14:40:49","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.thecarpetbaggerreport.com\/archives\/15991.html"},"modified":"2008-06-25T10:40:49","modified_gmt":"2008-06-25T14:40:49","slug":"maybe-the-white-house-can-try-sticking-their-fingers-in-their-ears-too","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/maybe-the-white-house-can-try-sticking-their-fingers-in-their-ears-too\/","title":{"rendered":"Maybe the White House can try sticking their fingers in their ears, too"},"content":{"rendered":"

As a rule, the Bush White House has a few reliable tactics it uses to avoid information it doesn’t want to hear. For example, when government reports might offer discouraging news that undermines the president’s agenda, the White House likes to eliminate the reports<\/a>. For that matter, Bush’s proclivity for “The Bubble,” in which only people who agree with the president are allowed to offer information, tends to keep ideological purity intact.<\/p>\n

But once in a while, the White House Bubble is pierced with information the Bush gang won’t like and doesn’t want to see. What to do? In the case of the Environmental Protection Agency and evidence on global warming, the Bush gang came up with a new trick: stop opening emails<\/a> suspected to include inconvenient truths.<\/p>\n

The White House in December refused to accept the Environmental Protection Agency’s conclusion that greenhouse gases are pollutants that must be controlled, telling agency officials that an e-mail message containing the document would not be opened, senior E.P.A. officials said last week.<\/p>\n

The document, which ended up in e-mail limbo, without official status, was the E.P.A.’s answer to a 2007 Supreme Court ruling that required it to determine whether greenhouse gases represent a danger to health or the environment, the officials said.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

I suppose the White House deserves some credit for being clever. The president’s team didn’t want to be bothered with facts and evidence, and they also didn’t want to admit that it was ignoring the guidance of their own EPA officials. The solution — simply leaving EPA emails unread — solved the problem (the political problem, that is, not the looming environmental catastrophe).<\/p>\n

One assumes that if EPA officials happened to stop by the West Wing, we’d see senior aides walking around with their fingers in their ears, yelling, “I can’t hear you! La la la la la la…”<\/p>\n

In this case, instead of opening the EPA’s email, the Bush gang began lobbying the EPA to forget about the email and tell the White House what it wanted to hear.
\n<\/p>\n

Over the past five days, the officials said, the White House successfully put pressure on the E.P.A. to eliminate large sections of the original analysis that supported regulation, including a finding that tough regulation of motor vehicle emissions could produce $500 billion to $2 trillion in economic benefits over the next 32 years. The officials spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the matter.<\/p>\n

Both documents, as prepared by the E.P.A., “showed that the Clean Air Act can work for certain sectors of the economy, to reduce greenhouse gases,” one of the senior E.P.A. officials said. “That’s not what the administration wants to show. They want to show that the Clean Air Act can’t work.”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Exactly. As is usually the case, they started with the answer and tried to work backwards. If that means refusing to open emails from the EPA because the agency’s facts were troublesome, so be it.<\/p>\n

Andrew Tilghman concluded<\/a>, “Before he left for Washington for the first time, former President Harry Truman got a piece of memorable advice: ‘Work hard, keep your mouth shut, and answer your mail.’ Maybe President Bush never got that same advice.”<\/p>\n

Someone probably sent him the advice in a letter. He didn’t open it.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

As a rule, the Bush White House has a few reliable tactics it uses to avoid information it doesn’t want to hear. For example, when government reports might offer discouraging news that undermines the president’s agenda, the White House likes to eliminate the reports. For that matter, Bush’s proclivity for “The Bubble,” in which only […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[617],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-15991","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15991","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=15991"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15991\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=15991"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=15991"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=15991"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}