The Blame Game

I'm assuming most people have seen this, but in case you haven't, courtesy of the Huffington Post, we have Robert Kennedy, Jr. who, apparently, is the tackiest man alive.

In March of 2001, just two days after EPA Administrator Christie Todd Whitman’s strong statement affirming Bush’s CO2 promise former RNC Chief Barbour responded with an urgent memo to the White House.

Barbour, who had served as RNC Chair and Bush campaign strategist, was now representing the president’s major donors from the fossil fuel industry who had enlisted him to map a Bush energy policy that would be friendly to their interests. His credentials ensured the new administration’s attention.

The document, titled “Bush-Cheney Energy Policy & CO2,” was addressed to Vice President Cheney, whose energy task force was then gearing up, and to several high-ranking officials with strong connections to energy and automotive concerns keenly interested in the carbon dioxide issue, including Energy Secretary
Spencer Abraham, Interior Secretary Gale Norton, Commerce Secretary Don Evans, White House chief of staff Andy Card and legislative liaison Nick Calio. Barbour pointedly omitted the names of Whitman and Treasury Secretary Paul O’Neill, both of whom were on record supporting CO2 caps. Barbour’s memo chided these administration insiders for trying to address global warming which Barbour dismissed as a radical fringe issue.

“A moment of truth is arriving,” Barbour wrote, “in the form of a decision whether this Administration’s policy will be to regulate and/or tax CO2 as a pollutant. The question is whether environmental policy still prevails over energy policy with Bush-Cheney, as it did with Clinton-Gore.” He derided the idea of regulating CO2 as “eco-extremism,” and chided them for allowing environmental concerns to “trump good energy policy, which the country has lacked for eight years.”

{...}On March 13, Bush reversed his previous position, announcing he would not back a CO2 restriction using the language and rationale provided by Barbour. Echoing Barbour’s memo, Bush said he opposed mandatory CO2 caps, due to “the incomplete state of scientific knowledge” about global climate change.

Well, the science is clear. This month, a study published in the journal Nature by a renowned MIT climatologist linked the increasing prevalence of destructive hurricanes to human-induced global warming.

{...}In 1998, Republican icon Pat Robertson warned that hurricanes were likely to hit communities that offended God. Perhaps it was Barbour’s memo that caused Katrina, at the last moment, to spare New Orleans and save its worst flailings for the Mississippi coast.

{my emphasis}

Niiiiiiiiiice, Bobby.

Note that this was published on Monday evening. No one had any idea of how bad the damage was, or how many people had been killed in Katrina's wake. No one had any idea about any of this, but Junior, who was safe in New York, just assumed that since the hurricane had passed over, this would be a good time to start banging the climate change gong. That Katrina could have been prevented if only Bush hadn't listened to Barbour and had decided to push Kyoto. Which is complete and utter bullshit and Junior knows it, too. If you want to blame anyone for not pushing Kyoto, blame your good buddy Bubba Clinton, who never submitted the Kyoto Treaty to the Senate for ratification. If only Clinton had pushed Kyoto through, well, why that would have been a few years earlier and that would have given us more time to prevent these horrible hurricanes!

Never mind that good ol' Junior decided to publish this little treatise before the bodies were even cold. Or even until we knew how many bodies there were to be buried---which, I might add, we still don't know. It's all about scoring cheap political points in the wake of one of the largest natural disasters to befall our country. Way to go, Junior. Way to be just another spoiled rotten, Kennedy bastard who assumes the world should listen to you because of your pedigree.

I sincerely hope that Junior is ashamed of himself. But I doubt he is. He's a Kennedy, after all: that family has absolutely no shame whatsoever.

I think it's genetic.

Posted by Kathy at August 31, 2005 10:17 AM | TrackBack