The Dusty Dog

Another Dubya Nomination

Generally, I'm not a person who cares if one has a child out of wedlock. That is a personal issue that doesn't concern me (unless of course, it directly impacts me and/or my family). Similarly, I don't care if people have extramarital affairs. That's between them and their spouses. Admittedly though, on the latter count, I generally find that affairs can be sleazy business, not pretty, and very selfish. But again, unless it directly affects me or my family, it's not my issue. It fall under the realm of personal affairs of which I have no interest.

However, what really frosts me is when the holier-than-thou, sanctimoniously self-pedestaled rightwing establishment, who have embraced this notion of "family values", and espouse the notion that anyone who does not embrace such family values is scum, or worse yet, a liberal, would then turn around and ignore anti-family values if it isn't expedient to their agenda of the day. Sounds a lot like the modus operandi of the republican neocon fascists these days, for sure.

Case in point -- our newly selected Secretary of the Interior, or as it's known in environmental circles, the Secretary of the Inferior. If I am going to uphold the family values measure of a person, then dirtbag Dirk Kempthorne fails miserably. What the freakin' hell was the dubya cockroach thinking about when he nominated this guy? Oh yeah, he wasn't thinking. He wasn't even leading. He is so out of control, as in he is not in control of our government, that likely some neocon scumbag just handed him a person and a speech, and said, "Nominate him." That is a very likely scenario. But, back to Dirtbag Dirk.

According to the Pensito Review, Dirkie has a whole lot of non-family values in his ugly closet.

But when Kempthorne was a U.S. senator, he had a reputation. If it is true, he made Bill Clinton look like a school boy. According to 43rd State Blues: Democracy for Idaho, it is widely rumored that:

* While he was philandering in D.C., he was married, of course — but he also had a full-time girlfriend from back home who worked in his office

* He and the girlfriend had a child

* When his senate career ended, his wife insisted that he give up the girlfriends, all of them, and move back to Idaho

* They moved back, but at least one girlfriend, the one with the child, returned to Idaho too

Did I need to mention that Kempthorne is a Republican?

Fact of the matter is, I still don't care about dirtbag, himself. I care more about his record as the dirtbag senator, then governor from Idaho that he really is. His record sucks. This from New West Politics article Please, Not Kempthorne:

Most enviros I talk to think Dirk Kempthorne is a reasonable guy and a good politician. He isn’t another James Watt, the icon man of the seventies who single-handedly doubled the membership of the Sierra Club, but Kempthorne has hardly been a champion for protecting our public lands. He has not, for example, come out against the Bush administration’s current plan to sell of public lands, even though most governors have opposed it. Conversely, he has close ties to industry and has even been called a “faithful mouthpiece for polluting industries.”

That’s probably an overstatement, but the fact is, Kempthorne, a former U.S. Senator who decided to run for governor instead a second term in the Senate, has consistently received a zero rating from the League of Conservation Voters—except once, when he soared up to a 6 percent rating, getting one vote correct, something about funding a rocket for the space program that nobody remembers. But he has always received a 100 percent rating from the U.S. Chamber of Commerce.

And more:

Recently, Kempthorne created quite a stir with Idaho’s contentious wolf-killing plan, and he opposed the Roadless Rule, even sued in an attempt to stop its implementation. He considers the rule a “federal edict,” forgetting that these are public lands belonging to all people in all states, not some people in Idaho.

Kempthorne prides himself as a consensus builder, but a few years ago, an amazing committee of timber companies and environmentalists reached a consensus and hatched a plan to restore grizzly bears in the Selway-Bitterroot Wilderness, but Kempthorne was primarily responsible for influencing Norton to kill it, even though her own scientists in her own agency, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, favored it.

Yes, read that last phrase one more time. ".... even though her own scientists in her own agency, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, favored it." That is a hallmark legacy of the Gail Norton administration over the Department of the Interior. Now that she's stepped down from her position, having stepped into the Abramoff shit, the bushies have found another one just like her. Makes me sick. And, sad. There is so much to lose, and with these bums at the helm, the faster we lose it all, the better.

With that in mind, I point you to the source of the photo at the beginning of this article, a site called Ridiculopathy. From the article, this exerpt:

One thing the President has learned in the last five years is that the old model for public land use, with its outmoded concepts like "parks" and "restricted use zones," has turned out to be an utter failure. The federal government spends billions every year to save America's beloved wilderness, and yet adorable woodland creatures still die every day. Bush argued that the long-standing policy has not only been wasteful but counterproductive as well. He pointed to recent usage statistics for places like Yellowstone and Yosemite that appear to show that the parks are being preserved to death.

"If we keep these lands in the public trust, the public will just end up ruining them by trampling them underfoot, littering, and setting random fires," said Bush. "The only sure way to protect these pristine examples of God's country is to remove them from the public domain- in other words, to sell them off to the highest bidder."

I leave you with that......

posted by Dusty Dog at 3/27/2006