The World's Fair

When your grandchildren ask the inevitable question -- "Was Dick Cheney real?" -- you would do well to pull out this week's four-part series in The Washington Post to verify that he truly existed. Today's feature, the fourth part, addresses the means by which Cheney has consistently and disturbingly sacrificed environmental and human health for the sake of near-term corporate profit.

And in a comment that could easily be the epitaph for the entire White House career of Bush and Cheney, the series of article ends thusly:

the administration [has] redefined the law in a way that could be valid "only in a Humpty-Dumpty world."

The Bush Administration is already well-renowned for its destructive environmental policies. We know this well enough.

But add to that the insidious actions of Cheney alone, his hand on the levers of environmental protection -- crafting ways to over-ride EPA strictures, supporting the nuclear industry over those with safety concerns by pushing Yucca Mountain, finagling the Clean Air Act to help polluters, pushing to lift the snowmobile ban on national parks, over-riding scientific, biological and ecological, evidence to support harmful, industry-driven decisions on fishing, ecosystem health, and water management -- this is just to list some of the many examples touched on in the article. Add all these to the body of general reporting on Bush and Cheney and that story is all the more hard to take.

In an unsurprising admission, former EPA head Christine Todd Whitman acknowledges that it was Cheney that led to her decision to resign from that post:

It was Cheney's insistence on easing air pollution controls, not the personal reasons she cited at the time, that led...Whitman to resign as administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency....

In addition, consider Cheney's adoption of the "leave no footprints" mantra of hikers: most of his actions require scrupulous investigation, because he does so well to leave no trace of his involvement. Those man-sized safes in his office are probably full of dead animals and toxic air.

Given the amount of activity Cheney has kept secret, intentionally and illegally, the portrayal that comes to light in Jo Becker and Barton Gellman's reporting is surely only scratching the surface. Unfortunately, I'd guess, almost none of the reports will seem unexpected to most of us. He's set the moral bar so very low.