Strangers to Truth

Joel Bleifuss December 22, 2003

The White House’s annual report, “2003: A Year of Accomplishment for the American People,” would never pass muster in the corporate world—well, perhaps at a company like Enron. The Center for American Progress, the new progressive political think tank in Washington, fact-checked this annual report and cataloged 25 “inaccurate and deceptive claims” that the administration makes about its record over the past year (http://www.americanprogress.org). Included in that list is this doozie: “The Bush administration proposed stringent new rules on power plant emissions.” But, as CBS News reported on March 1, 2002: The chief of the Environmental Protections Agency’s civil enforcement office has resigned, complaining the White House is undermining anti-pollution efforts at power plants that violate clean air laws. Eric Schaeffer, a lawyer at the EPA for a dozen years dating from the first Bush administration, said in a letter to EPA Administrator Christie Whitman that the White House ‘seems determined to weaken the rules we are trying to enforce.’

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Joel Bleifuss, a former director of the Peace Studies Program at the University of Missouri-Columbia, is the editor & publisher of In These Times, where he has worked since October 1986.