traviscommeau

from the president who, in the Town Meeting formatted debate called himself some sort of herald of the environment:

"Mountaintop removal," a coal-industry practice that began to be widely used in the late 1980s, has led to the dumping of thousands of tons of debris into valleys and the burial of more than 700 miles of mountain streams. By 1999, the mining method had been mostly halted by court rulings. But in May 2002, the Bush administration reclassified the resultant debris as "fill" instead of "waste," essentially legalizing the technique, and the dumping, once again. As a result, industry activity has rebounded. The administration has also proposed a regulatory change that would end a two-decade ban on mining within 100 feet of a stream, and another that would allow ditches dug by coal companies to serve as substitutes for streams that companies had destroyed. The coal industry has raised $9 million for the Republican Party since 1998.

Such rephrasing has played a role in other Bush administration environmental policies as well. In 2003, the Environmental Protection Agency downgraded the "hazardous" classification of mercury pollution from power plants, effectively granting utilities a 15-year extension on the implementation of pollution controls. And earlier this year, the Energy Department reclassified millions of gallons of "high-level" radioactive waste as "incidental," and in doing so, allowed the government to avoid the expense of removing it.

McSweeney's Daily Reason to Dispatch Bush...

oh yeah, and the whole "recession started before i was in office" thing:

"...claims the economy was already in a recession when Bush took office, but the National Bureau of Economic Research (which dates business cycles) says the recession actually began in March 2001, after Bush took office in January."