White House Memo Not So Smokin’ After All
After all the hoopla last week over a White House memo calling the EPA’s findings on global warming baseless and inaccurate, it turns out the smoking-gun memo isn’t as smoking as Sen. John Barrasso, its champion, claimed it was.
Grist investigated the memo and determined that this White House document wasn’t even written by anyone in the White House or the Office of Management and Budget, as Barrasso claims in this interview with conservative talk-show host Glenn Beck. This claim isn’t consistent with the process with which the document was produced. Grist outlines how a document flows in the government: The EPA put out its findings on global warming, and then OMB sent it out to every agency in the federal government. Any one of those agencies could have made comments about it, the result of which was a memo that, theoretically, could have been written by anyone in the government.
So what does this mean? The Obama administration is not against EPA, as Barrasso says. The fact that this questionable memo was heralded as the “smoking gun” needed to show that the EPA’s true intentions are political instead of scientific also implies a sort of desperation on the part of the minority party in D.C. Is this the best the party can come up with? Come on, guys. You’re going to need something with a little more credibility.
Photo Credit: me_no_james on Flickr under a Creative Commons License
You told us what it wasn’t, what was it then? Who wrote it? Your post doesn’t seem complete.