The Art of the Edit, Part II

I’d been planning on giving myself the day off today, Bush, but a piece in yesterday’s Los Angeles Times caught my eye, and it seemed so relevant to what we have been talking about this past week that I felt I couldn’t just let it pass.

The article concerns two retired Bureau of Land Management scientists, a biologist and a hydrologist, who are outraged that a report to which their research had contributed was distorted beyond recognition to support policy changes they had vehemently opposed. The original draft on proposed new grazing regulations warned that the changes would have a “significant adverse impact” on wildlife, but that phrase was edited out in favor of one concluding that the new grazing regulations would be “beneficial to animals.” Also cut, amongst a host of other significant conclusions, was the one that “The Proposed Action will have a slow, long-term adverse on wildlife and biolological diversity in general.”

The Times report cites Eric Campbell, the biologist in question, as follows: “This a whitewash. They took all of our science and reversed it 180 degrees… They rewrote everything. It’s a crime.” Another crime. The beneficiaries of the proposed BLM changes are, as usual, the business interests-—in this case, the meat industry. The losers in the long run are the American people, who get to sacrifice another piece of their common heritage to the short-term, bottom-line financial beneft of the few.

It sounds like the usual approach of your administration to the results of scientific study, Bush. We saw what happened just the other day in the case of the scientific reports on global warming. You ignore the data in favor of political or ideological ends; or you minimize it; and, if all else fails, you edit it out of existence. What a scam you’re running there, Bush, in the name of government.