Politics: Priorities

The Bush administration, in an admirable demonstration of exactly how little it actually cares about the environment, has let the EPA's water pollution tracking system essentially turn to mush. According to the EPA's own inspector general, the system is "obsolete, full of faulty data and does not take into account thousands of significant pollution sources." Read on:

"The deliberate neglect of this project is a perfect example of the Bush administration's effort to dismantle the Clean Water Act with as little public awareness as possible," said Daniel Rosenberg, a lawyer for the Natural Resources Defense Council.

"Rather than investing in modernizing the system for tracking compliance and enforcing the law," Mr. Rosenberg said, "they are wasting money and resources on rewriting the rules to eliminate protections for tens of thousands of streams and wetlands, weakening essential programs and promoting various initiatives that range from useless to harmful."

I, for one, am shocked -- shocked! -- by the very intimation that the Bush administration ever planned to do anything about water pollution. Why, the very thought of it is absurd.