Pacific Views

Fair and Balanced

Fox News worked overtime to earn their copyright in this Sept. 11th piece about Hillary's Sept. 11 Smoke Screen:

Sen. Hillary Clinton says she’ll block President Bush’s nominee for chief of the Environmental Protection Agency (search) because the EPA allegedly misled New Yorkers about health risks after the Sep. 11 attacks.

It apparently doesn’t matter to Sen. Clinton that the president’s nominee, Utah Gov. Mike Leavitt (search), was governor of Utah at the time and had no connection to the EPA’s post-attack response. Other facts about the alleged post-attack health risks don’t seem to matter to her, either.

What does seem to be important to Sen. Clinton is politics; she’s exploiting the Sep. 11 attacks as a smokescreen to attack the president on the environment and his choice to head the EPA.

The EPA announced a week after the attacks that the air near ground zero (search) was “safe” to breathe. With the exception of some rescue workers who were overexposed to fumes and dust emanating from the wreckage, the EPA’s assurance seems to have been correct. ...

This article was authored by a Steven Milloy of Junkscience.com. The site and the books he's selling on it appear dedicated to the idea that there's nothing wrong with anything, except maybe high radiation levels in the Capitol building. Second hand smoke? Not a problem. Global warming? The product of the fevered imaginations of the Green theocracy.

He closes the article by suggesting that if the senator wants to block something, it should be the health tracking study proposed to keep track of individuals who were most exposed to the pollution. Which would be handy, because if you have no evidence one way or the other, it's so much easier to paint legitimate concern as mindless paranoia.

This is a news release covering the ground zero air quality study, and here's the Nature article on the topic. This is a press release from Senator Clinton's website, from which you can note that objections were raised by no less than the Inspector General of the EPA.

And guys, until you start referring to the president as "George" in your headlines, that's Senator Clinton to you, pal.

Posted by natasha at September 14, 2003 04:45 PM | TrackBack