After having been rightly scorched for his stupidly false recent public statement that humankind’s behavior may not be a major contributor to global warming, EPA chief and oil industry hack Scott Pruitt has taken to discussing his views almost exclusively with media he trusts to lob him only friendly, softball questions. Mostly, that means Fox News.
This is no knock on Fox News or the people who watch it. Fox News has the First Amendment right to broadcast as it sees fit, and its viewers similarly have the First Amendment right to watch whatever they wish.
But it is most definitely a knock on Pruitt. As the head of a federal agency established to protect public health (EPA), Pruitt has intentionally devoted his tenure to gutting the agency altogether, abolishing its sacred mission in favor of letting corporate polluters savage the environment and human health. For example, besides embracing the idiot “science” of climate change “hoaxers”, Pruitt has also recommended a huge (30+%) whacking of the EPA’s budget–greater than for any other federal agency; cut programs intended to clean up dangerously contaminated sites and waterways; reversed without explanation EPA’s finding that a herbicide was dangerous to young children and should be taken off the market; stripped the EPA’s website of important scientific notifications to American citizens; and fired many of the scientists on the agency’s Advisory Board–just to punctuate the message that the Trump/Pruitt EPA is hostile to legitimate science.
A man who evidently finds such purpose in threatening the lives and health of American citizens–especially children, who are the most vulnerable to a contaminated environment–should have the guts to defend himself to people who want to ask him real questions. For any public official who repeatedly threatens the lives of American children, answering serious questions should be the very least that the job demands.
And if he can’t gin up the guts to do that, he should quit the job. And go work for the oil companies he thinks he’s supposed to be working for now.
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