So pending Senate confirmation, the new EPA Director is going to be current Acting EPA Administrator Steve Johnson. Mr. Johnson is a professional research scientist, and is being held out to the public by the Bush Administration as a “a talented scientist and skilled manager with a lifelong commitment to environmental stewardship.”
Many environmental groups are reluctantly lapping it up like so much spilled gruel, perhaps in the hopes that a professional scientist from inside the EPA will be more likely to make environmentally beneficial policy decisions than would be a career politician. Those hopes may be slim, however, as Johnson’s nurtured his touted “lifelong committment to environmental stewardship” while serving in a number of capacities, including Director of Operations at Hazelton Research Products, operator of the Reston, Virginia-based virus lab that has been targeted by the US Government for several instances of animal rights abuses, and that gained nationwide fame after it accidentally suffered an Ebola outbreak in 1989; (admittedly, this isn’t so much an implication of Mr. Johnson as it is a rant-suiting coincidence…), and Chief of Operations at Litton Bionetics, the bioweapons research/development arm of Texas- and California-based weapons ubermanufacturer Litton Industries, which contributed a little under $650,000 to republican political campaigns during 2000, and which was subsequently absorbed by Northrop-Grumman in 2001.
It’s not that I’m at all surprised by any of this; it’s just that I wish the White House would get the subterfuge over with and simply appoint Joe Hazelwood EPA Director. Disingenuous behavior thinly veiled as a compromise makes me long for the sound environmental policymaking of my home state’s own former governor, Christine Todd “Superfund” Whitman.
At the risk of sounding trite; what did we expect?
I imagine that Bricker and Brutus are aware that there is more to this than simply animal rights (and we would disagree on that anyway). But really, someone involved in the development of bioweapons has no place in an environmental organisation. Unless they have had a serious change of heart and are willing to disavow their prior employment.
It looks to me like making Gilles de Rais the Director of Children’s Affairs in a social organisation
The reason I mentioned the animel abuse charges was to suggest, albeit sarcastically, that this allegation is not relevant for the head of the EPA.
I do not accept your suggestion that someone involved in a bioweapons organization is per se unqualified to run the EPA. That’s nonsense, and it’s not shared by anyone that matters (the President, and enough Senators to confirm).
I probably am not on Bricker’s list of people that matter, but I have to agree that I don’t see how being involved in bioweapon research is a disqualifier for heading the EPA.
I concur. I don’t paticularly like bioweapons, but it’s not really the EPA’s call whether or not they get made. In fact, his experience could arguably serve him when dealing with biohazard issues.
The outbreak at Hazelton is more troubling, but not an instant diqualifier either.
When did George W. Bush have the opportunity to even meet someone with a lifelong commitment to environmental stewardship? Was there a security breakdown?
Are those anything like the Web Board Standards for Dialectical Hyperbole? :rolleyes:
My point was not that Mr. Johnson isn’t qualified; hell, he’s an experienced scientist with high-level public executive experience, and EPA Administrator is a unique federal agency position in that it demands both. He is qualified. My point was that this is a perfect example of the White House pushing a rightward economic agenda by calling it left. I’d have more respect for the Bush Administration on the issue of environmental politics, at least in an adversarial way, if it would simply try to make a case to the public that free markets regulate environmental cleanliness better than governmental controls, that there are times, such as recession and war, when industry productivity is more important than pollution monitoring, and that some natural resources, such as oil, coal, natural gas and uranium are more valuable an important than others, such as forests, rivers and animals. I’d also have more respect if Republicans would simply come right out and say, “We control Congress and the White House, and we’re gonna push our agenda until the pendulum swings back. Democrats can sit down for a while.”
My own personal political leanings aside (for I’m as liberal a democrat as they come), partisanship, debate, opposition, bickering, fighting and gridlock isn’t what’s wrong with American politics today. Partisanship and debate is not only good, it’s necessary. What isn’t necessary – what is corruptive, dishonest, misleading, counterproductive, disingenuous, and malaise-inducing – is packaging one thing as something else entirely in an attempt to sell it to the public. Republicans and Democrats both do this, and packaging a senior-level scientist/executive at a multibillion-dollar military bioweapons manufacturing company as some sandal-wearing, Clean Air Act-quoting do-gooder in an attempt to sell him to environmentalists is precisely such a silly, underhanded exercise.
Especially as it occurred fully a decade after Mr. Johnson had last worked for the company. The OP alluded to this (a “rant-suiting coincidence”) but just to make it clear.
