This is cute:
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.
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.
Other well known strategies that could dovetail nicely with this include holding your breath until you are blue, stating the check is in the mail, the tantrum, claiming the dog ate your homework, running away from home, or putting your fingers in your ears and yelling “LALALALALALALA.” Seriously, I would love to see someone try this shit with the IRS. “Sorry, guys, I never opened the email so as far as I am concerned, I don’t owe you a damned thing.” I hear prisons for white collar crimes have an almost resort like atmosphere.
Parents all over the country now have to be aware that the statement that “If you study hard, you can grow up and be President” is now a damned lie. As the Bush administration has shown, you don’t have to grow up.
El Cid
Before I even got to the 2nd paragraph, I had the “lalalalalalala” playing in my head. If we can all hear it, either it means our governments should know better, or our determined major news anchors must work that much harder to pretend these people are serious politicians worthy of respectful discussions.
Actually, I do think a big part of the support for the Bush Jr. administration consisted of people who wanted to get one over on the smarty pants and other successful types, and they figgered Bush Jr. was just the guy to show ’em. Now that their lives suck as a consequence, many, though not all, have lost their Reagan-era fascination with the lure of ‘stupid’ and ‘I don’t need no fancy book-larnin’ ta tell me about X, and yoo libruls gonna git yorn’ as a positive approach to governance.
cleek
the grownups are in charge!
Incertus
I should have stopped being surprised by any of this years ago, but every once in a while, they catch me. Damn.
RSA
I think it used to be the case that we could depend on the President to make a good faith effort to do his job. There’s apparently an infinite number of ways to avoid dealing with problems, and this administration has no shame–they’ll just keep doing what they’re doing, no matter how stupid or evil it seems.
Eural Joiner
no matter how stupid or evil it
seemsactually is.Fixed.
Chris Johnson
This is the part that floors me.
You can’t READ THE FUCKING EMAIL because it contains ideas you don’t like?
You can’t LOOK AT IT??
Seriously, what the hell? I’m not sure which is worse- the idea that if they read the email the scary treehugger bullshit might infect their beautiful minds, or the arrogance of ‘we could read it, but fuck you’. Both are ridiculous, but the first is creepy and the second is petulant and mean.
FUCK YOU PEOPLE, I PAY YOUR SALARY, READ THE FUCKING THING.
jibeaux
I am definitely going to quit opening bills. They can send me a smaller bill if they want me to open it.
Dennis - SGMM
Other unopened mails:
rob!
damn, 2 trillion spent on Iraq and Bush won’t spring for Microsoft Office?
scarshapedstar
PLEASURE OF TEH PRESIDENT
Paul L.
Because real adults/serious scientists call for trials of high crimes against humanity and nature against those who disagree with them.
Juvenile
You wanna hear about greenhouse gases? Here, pull my finger.
jibeaux
Paul, if you don’t have anything to say about Duke Lacrosse, just don’t say anything at all. Your mama should’ve taught you that.
hmd
I know you are but what am I?
El Cid
NASA scientist Hansen is obviously a candidate for enemy non-combatant status, and should be guested to Gitmo forthwith.
David Hunt
Slight technical point. The IRS doesn’t send correspondence by email. They use U.S. Mail. If you ever receive what looks like an official email from the IRS, especially if it asks for any type of personal/financial information, it’s a scam. No matter how good or bad the letter sounds, it’s a scam. If you really think you need to respond to an email from the IRS, look in your phonebook under United States Government and call their 800 number.
Chris, it’s even worse than that. From John’s post:
Because the document was mandated by SCOTUS, they can’t just ignore as if it was something they had initiated and somehow failed to sufficiently torture the data to confess that global warming was a myth. So by refusing the open the email, they are contriving to say that it has not been received and so they don’t have to act on it. If were just some miscellaneous EPA study, they’d read it in detail so they could identify the ideological heretics and crush them.
Chuck
That my friends, is what happens when you elected a President based upon his religious ideologies.
Neo-Conservatives are a cancer to the Republican Party.
Almost makes me ashamed of saying that I am a Conservative.
CFisher
Maybe it’s because I left GOP Crazytown, but I really don’t understand this mindset.
Even if you’re not 100% convinced that Global Warming is man made, we’ve known for decades that the nice stuff that pours out of your car’s tailpipe and coal plant towers ain’t exactly healthy or good for the environment and there’s no reason why we shouldn’t be working toward reducing it anyway, if only to curb growing health issues.
Should it be our number one priority? Probably not, but it should be a goal we’re moving toward.
4tehlulz
win
Tom Hilton
At my job, attorneys are always asking me to do stuff. Sometimes it’s annoying, time-consuming, tedious stuff. I think I’m going to stop opening their e-mails, and then I won’t have to do it.
OriGuy
The EPA is just going to have to get a process server from Atilla the Hun School of Charm to take the document over there by hand.
Napoleon
I think I saved this article somewhere but in the run up to the 2000 election there was an article about Bush in something like Vanity Fair or some similar publication, and if you read it it was hard not to come away thinking that Bush was so spectularly inmature that it was actually frightening that we could be considering electing someone like him as President. I am to this day absolutely amazed that anyone other then Barbara Bush ever voted for the guy.
Shygetz
Hell, you don’t have to study hard, either.
The EPA should have a the local Sherrif serve the report on the President like it was a subpoena, and invite a few newspeople along. That would be awesome.
jcricket
Things like this show why the idea of Republicans ending up a permanent minority is not really far fetched. I know that American’s aren’t all in love with intellectualism, but a party that routinely ignores, rejects and demonizes all forms of scientific inquiry is going nowhere in the long run.
Everyone involved in every field of empirical research – from biologists, chemists, economics, psychiatrists, doctors, etc. – is basically an “enemy” to the modern-day GOP.
This not only makes the enemy list long, it virtually guarantees that the GOP will end up on the wrong side of history on every important global and US-specific issue.
RSA
If you’re working in the Department of Justice, you can always say that you thought you detected liberal tendencies on the part of the email sender. Deselected!
The Moar You Know
The history of Western civilization begs to differ with you. The Church strangled science for centuries in Europe and did very, very well.
jcricket
When information was less easily spreadable across geographic boundaries (i.e. controlled and suppressed easily by the rich) and society less driven itself by technology, I’d agree with you. But I think that’s no longer the case. I’m not saying fear-mongering and anti-science rhetoric don’t work for a while, but reality catches up to you far faster these days, with the freer global flow of information. Short of Burma-like Juntas, the long-term ability for TPTB to really suppress information is pretty low. It took less than a decade for “reality” to catch up with GW and the Republicans, for example.
Ignore even the larger issues like global warming, scientific inquiry is driving business and capitalism these days at a far greater rater than it did for those centuries you mention. So having all those sciency-types as your enemies puts you on the wrong side of capitalism and business, basically. On some of those bigger issues, consider when big business gets behind national healthcare (and it will, b/c it’s the only thing to get us out of this mess). Republicans will have their knee-jerk anti-government reaction, and go down fighting on the wrong side of history again (like when they defended segregation and anti-miscegenation through the 50s and 60s).
BTW, this comment from an EPA official applies to everything the Bush administration is pretending doesn’t exist, dontcha think?
The Moar You Know
Paul’s right. Fuck science and scientists, they’re all assholes who think they’re better than us plebes. They need to get off their high horses and stop telling us what to do and get back to the work God intended them to do – building better weapons to kill Moslem infidels.
binzinerator
That’s also a very fundamentalist thing to do, too. You don’t send your kids to public school, you homeschool them (and demand federal money to do so) because public schools contain ideas you don’t like. You don’t read certain books, magazines or articles, or ban them to prevent others from reading them, because they contain ideas you don’t like. You demonize entire groups of people, because they have ideas you don’t like. You forbid certain things, call it ‘sin’, like premarital sex or homosexuality, because these things are expressions of ideas you don’t like.
The Moar You Know
jcricket, good points.
However, I think that while economics dictates a free flow of information, but it doesn’t necessarily have to dictate it for everyone.
I think the ideal scenario for big business would be a captive populace that is largely scientifically illiterate, with elites who aren’t.
Oh, and this:
This was Democrats, southern Democrats specifically. The Republican party, at the time a largely permanent minority in Congress, didn’t become the party of racists until LBJ passed the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which drove the southern Democrats en masse into the Republican party, who were more than happy to get the votes.
Rick Taylor
Where did that phrase, “when the grown ups are in charge” come from? I remember hearing it over and over again, and never understanding it. Bush kept reading “My Pet Goat” when the nation was under attack, and he dithered while an American city drowned. He likes to act like a buffoon in public, and even before he was elected, he made campaign promises we could have our lunch and eat it to, giving out big tax cuts and balancing the budget. That phrase never made sense to me.
Frank Jacobs
I’m half-surprised they didn’t just do a wipe on the email server and say “Email? What email?”
Jon Karak
Luv it!
TenguPhule
BushCo: We lost them along with the other 10 million or so. Pay no attention to the harddrives being crunched behind the curtain…. /BushCo
jcricket
But doesn’t this kind of prove my point? Democrats could have stayed the party filled with those Southern-racist-Democrats, but what happened is those people defected to their “new home” in the Republican party. The Democrats ended up on the right side of history, and the Republicans embraced the wrong side (and still do, in some quarters).
I think the same thing’s happening right now on a host of issues. Anti-environmental or anti-gay “Democrats” will end up switching to (or running as) Republicans. People who oppose national healthcare, want unreasonably low taxes (to better bankrupt the country), etc. – all Republican issues.
But Republicans bash the elites. If Republicans were able to meld an embrace of elites/science with a “pro-business” (read: anti-consumer) agenda, they’d be fine. But because of their fundie base and anti-government bent, they can’t do that.
Big businesses are extremely dependent on basic research from scientists (elites). When those big businesses, with all their might, oppose the reality of science (climate change, tobacco, government funded healthcare, WMD), they eventually lose.
jcricket
Although one funny thing is that the Amish don’t do this. There’s a formal period where they allow/insist their teenagers experience the wider world before committing their adult lives to an Amish lifestyle. 90% of the teens that go out on Ramspringen (sp?) end up coming back. And the Amish have lots of babies and are actually a fast growing minority in America.
Rome Again
Got news for you, drowning government in a bathtub is only the beginning with these folks, they are intent upon making sure the earth is uninhabitable as soon as possible too. I really am beginning to believe these are Satan’s minions at the helm of the most powerful government in the world.
John Cole
It was a GOP phrase repeated frequently after Gore lost meant to signify that the Republicans would restore honesty and integrity to the White House after the sleazy Clinton years.
Sherrell
The sad thing is that this doesn’t even surprise me…but on the other hand a member of the EPA couldn’t have printed out a paper copy and had it delivered? Email was really their only option?? Maybe they should of had Osama read it in a tapped message right before an election.
Kyle
The White House in December refused to accept the Environmental Protection Agency’s conclusion that greenhouse gases are pollutants that must be controlled
Shorter GOP:
I demand the right to poop on the floor anywhere I feel like, and you can’t stop me.