[extropy-chat] Bill Moyers' Comments - Debunked

[Mike Lorrey]

--- Damien Broderick <thespike at satx.rr.com> wrote:

> At 08:24 AM 2/7/2005 -0800, Mike wrote:
> 
> >quote attributed to Regan
> >admin Interior Sect'y James Watt is entirely fabricated.
> 
> Interesting!
> 
> <James Watt was a controversial figure; but one thing he was not 
> controversial for was advocating environmental pillaging, on the
> theory 
> that Jesus would be back any day now. That would have been quite a
> news 
> story in the early 1980s, had it been true.>
> 
> But it must have been `quite a news story in the early 1980s',
> because I was aware of it back then (and horrified by the alleged
> claim) in deepest darkest Oz. My news sources would have been
> conventional mass media; I didn't read specialized `leftist'
> journals, and the web didn't yet exist. Maybe I heard/read the
> rumor during a visit to the States late in 1981.

One must distinguish between what Watt actually said and what the left
editorial punditry accused him of. I too remember that the leftist
editors in the mainstream media quite commonly excoriated him as a
rapacious leveler of the wilderness, but this is merely left wing ad
hominem, of the same sort that they spout when a fiscal conservative
proposes not actual budget cuts, but reductions in the percent of
growth in budgets, they scream how that pol is 'decimating' the
government program (this was a common tactic against Gingrich in the
90's, for example.)

What Watt was doing was to put the brakes on what had previously been a
free hand control by left wing tree huggers over Interior and EPA, when
he demanded that proposals have a scientific basis and he proposed the,
then shocking, idea that wilderness could have multiple concurrent
uses, not just that of cute photogenic fuzzy animals, but by groups of
humans for, oh my god, profitable purposes. Shockers.

=====
Mike Lorrey
Vice-Chair, 2nd District, Libertarian Party of NH
"Necessity is the plea for every infringement of human freedom.
It is the argument of tyrants; it is the creed of slaves."
                                      -William Pitt (1759-1806) 
Blog: http://www.xanga.com/home.aspx?user=Sadomikeyism


		
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