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Medieval Vice President

The Washington Post wraps up its series on Dick Cheney with a long story about his role promoting pollution: “The vice president has intervened in many cases to undercut long-standing environmental rules for the benefit of business.”

His actions directly led to “the largest fish kill the West had ever seen, with tens of thousands of salmon rotting on the banks of the Klamath River.”

Be sure to read to the end to see Cheney’s role pushing a new rule to gut the Clean Air Act, causing EPA administrator Christine Whitman to resign.

I just couldn’t sign it,” she [Whitman] said. “The president has a right to have an administrator who could defend it, and I just couldn’t.”

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A federal appeals court has since found that the rule change violated the Clean Air Act. In their ruling, the judges said that the administration had redefined the law in a way that could be valid “only in a Humpty-Dumpty world.”

A Humpty-Dumpty world created by the Vice President. Or perhaps he should be called the Head Vice President, for the torture he has put the country through.