Chris Matthews mentioned on his show last week that Dick Cheney needs to testify about his backroom deals with the corporate oil big wigs during the Bush administration, called the Energy Task Force. I agree 100%.
Vodpod videos no longer available.As we know from our own comment threads right here on this very blog, right-wingers are expert at taking a few facts from situations that appear to be superficially similar but really aren’t upon reflection or closer examination and using them to attack liberals.And so, in the last few days, the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico has become Obama’s Katrina. Um…look, I’m as pro-pelican as the next guy, and obviously I don’t mean to gainsay the scope of this environmental catastrophe, which will end up being staggering.
But Katrina killed about 1,500 humans. And no, it’s not George Bush’s personal fault that they died, either. But I still rate Katrina a far bigger tragedy for that reason.
And now it turns out, according to an environmental lawyer whose interview on Ed Schultz last week is getting a lot of circulation, that this leak may well be traceable in part to…Dick Cheney.
[…] Mike Papantonio, said on the Schultz show in an interview you can watch here that it was Cheney’s energy task force – the secretive one that he wouldn’t say much about publicly – that decided that the switches, which cost $500,000, were too much a burden on the industry. The Papantonio segment starts at around 5:00 in and lasts three minutes or so.
In the interests of disclosure I will note that I haven’t heard the phrase “acoustic switch” until this weekend, so I don’t really know. And obviously the fact that the US isn’t alone in not requiring this switch indicates that there are legitimate questions about cost v. efficacy. So maybe it’s just one of those things.
But then again, maybe it’s not. Regulatory decisions have consequences all the time, and the people who made them should be asked to justify their decisions in a democracy. It’ll be very interesting to watch this week and see if other news outlets pursue this. More…
