Here's Strieff at Red State on the matter:
This is a shame and, at the same time, it was inevitable. Like Scott Pruitt at EPA, Zinke understood the agency he lead, he understood how that agency had betrayed and abused everyday Americans in service to powerful, leftwing interests, and he set about systematically dismantling the infrastructure that allowed that to happen. One of Zinke’s first acts was to use his authority to reassign members of the senior executive service from their personal fiefdoms which resulted in several much-needed resignations. He actively worked to roll back the Obama abuse of designating extravagant amounts of real estate as “national monuments” to thwart development and lock in environmental policies. On the downside, he, like Pruitt, seemed to have difficulty in establishing boundaries between his official and personal conduct. And, like Pruitt, even though no major misconduct was proven, the miasma of corruption hung heavy over his tenure in office.Wanted: someone with these men's understanding of the importance of reining in government bureaucracy and keeping government's hands off individual choices about property and what energy forms people use, but whose judgement about how to steer clear of perceptions of funny business are a little better honed.
As we near the completion of our fourth decade of regressive domination of public discourse, surrendering our moral capital and robbing ourselves and future generations of a healthy and prosperous society, it is no wonder that the Right has such a perverse notion of public service and a view of public resources and, indeed, government itself as just something there for the looting. It is an odd but I suppose inevitable result that the Right would abandon the protections of the individual and the conservation of public resources in favor of deifying large corporate interests.
ReplyDeleteNo, the wonder is that selfless public servants -- and here I am referring to the court files clerk or the health department technician who collects a vital warning of a West Nile outbreak from the mosquito traps as much as I mean first responders -- continue safeguarding and creating anew everyday this blessing of a nation in the face of a persistent wave of popular "government is evil" and "taxation is theft" type nonsense.
Whatever amount of government is needed - and it's never very much - it should be kept as local and small-scale as possible.
ReplyDeleteAnd government must be made to puke all over itself to justify taking the first red cent from any of us. We earned that money. It's ours to say what is done with it.
And the federal government owns an obscene amount of Western land.
ReplyDeleteSee, you say the "federal government owns" those resources, but that is incorrect factually and philosophically. YOU own that land, and so do I, and so does everyone else. But where is YOUR cut of the so-called "thwart(ed) development"?
DeleteThe money to buy it was taken from me at gunpoint.
DeleteAha! A new reader... LOL.
ReplyDelete:o)
I didn't do it.
ReplyDeleteI didn't do it either.
ReplyDelete