I took my dog for a walk yesterday, and something happened that me realize: he's got more on the ball, morally, than a lot of appointees in the Bush administration.
Bodhi is a large, white malemute, very wolfish in look but not in affect, and I've worked a bit to train him: you don't want a big dog like that to be out of control. So we were walking in the park and came on the dead carcass of a squirrel. Dead meat of any kind is naturally interesting to Bodhi, but I didn't want him to fool with it. I called him off, and I could see that he had a moment of hestiation. Self interest says, 'do this.' Duty says, 'go to Eric.' He did the right thing and left the squirrel alone to come back to me. Which means: he's capable of recognizing a conflict of interest, and knowing on what side he has to resolve it.
Which is more than you can say for Bush appointee Julie MacDonald.
Julie MacDonald was deputy assistant secretary of the interior for fish and wildlife and parks from 2004 until her resignation on May 1, 2007. She resigned a week before the House Natural Resources Committee was to begin oversight hearings into charges that she (or other ideologues operating through her) had exerted pressure to change the science on which decisions about endangered species are made.
And notice: I'm not saying that MacDonald "exerted political pressure" or that "political pressure" was exerted on her: I'm saying that she was a footsoldier in the concerted Bush Administration effort to have ideology override science. I put it this way because I think we have to reclaim the word "political" from misuse. The pressure was ideological, not political. To call it "political" equates it with other forms of political pressure--it puts it on a moral par with, say, the pressure that a neighborhood brings to bear to get a stop sign put up at the end of a residential street. Trying to change objective scientific results in order to suit a political agenda isn't "political pressure"--it's ideological fanaticism, and we should call it that.
The facts of MacDonald's resignation have been told in lots of places: here, here, here, and here for instance. You can go to the original source--the internal review done by the Department of Interior's Office of Inspector General--here. (It's redacted, but makes for fascinating reading.) And it's very instructive to turn from the IG's report to MacDonald's own sworn testimony in 2004 before the Subcommittee on Fisheries, Wildlife, and Water of the Senate Committee on the Environment and Public Works. (Can you spell "dissemble"? "Hypocrite"?)
Kos diarists devilstower and mcjoan have taken the subject up too.
MacDonald's story is just part of a larger narrative: the efforts of this administration to attack the scientific foundation of good environmental policy. You've seen the way the story played out with global climate change. MacDonald was by no means the author of this ideology-against-science narrative, and I don't believe she was (as the military would say) a "renegade element" in this overall theater of confrontation. Most likely: she did what was expected of her, and fell on her sword--resigned--when the forces of truth, probity, rule of law, and sane environmental policy closed in around her.
MacDonald is back in the news today because the Fish and Wildlife Service announced yesterday that seven of the decisions that she influenced were officially reversed.
So, good news: "the system worked." MacDonald's downfall started with an anonymous tip, a whistle-blower inside FWS, and here we are, a few years later, with justice, and sane environmental policy, restored.
Except there are a few problems. Only some of the decisions she affected have been reversed. And the damage that we humans do to nature is now done so rapidly that there is reason to be pessimistic that our regulatory systems, even working the way they are supposed to, can respond to endangerment and irreversible damage quickly enough. Add to the timeline of recognize-diagnose-act another five years of ideologically motivated wrangling, and you increase the damage we do--and you thereby increase the likelihood that undiminished economic development will destroy civilization's necessary root in nature.
There's an element in today's Associated Press story that wasn't highlighted in the original disclosures that came about in the wake of MacDonald's resignation, and which do not appear in the IG's report. The nugget is buried way down in the AP story (in my local paper, it's the last paragraph, which gives the story a kind of cliff-hanger feel: what will happen next?) To quote the Barre, VT, Times Argus: "In her three years on the job, MacDonald was also heavily involved in delisting the Sacramento splittail, a fish found only in California's Central Valley, where she owned an 80-acre farm on which the fish lived."
So let's get this straight: MacDonald used her position within the Fish and Wildlife Service to delist a species that appears on property she owned. This is blatant conflict of interest.
The conflict didn't come to her passively, as is usually the case with conflict cases. She, trained as a Civil Engineer, went out of her way to insert herself into the process by which the Service produced and analyzed field reports on endangered species. She didn't need to recuse herself from decisions about species on land she owned; all she needed to do to avoid conflict of interest was to keep away from the processes of scientific analysis by which species are listed and reviewed for endangered status.
My dog has a better-developed moral sense that she demonstrated in her work at FWS. Has this woman no shame?
I want to read sworn testimony from her in answer to that question, and others: What exactly did she think entitled her to pursue her own personal interests at the expense of the public good? Was she lying when she gave her testimony before committees of Congress? Was she in contact with anyone in the White House, or with any Republican political operatives, as she exerted her ideological influence on decisions at FWS? Or was she a "free-range" ideologue, trusted to do the ideologically right thing without party oversight and control?
I hope we haven't heard the last of Julie MacDonald; she ought to be haled into court, or made to give an account of herself before the House Natural Resources Committee. I know there are bigger fish to fry; but putting MacDonald on the stand, under oath, is one way to get at them--and to put further into the public eye a legitimate campaign issue for '08. The Republicans have been, and ought to be portrayed as, the party of ideological stupidity, moral blindness, cronyism, and cupidity. Bringing MacDonald to testify, somewhere, under oath would be a good start toward restoring sanity and rule of principle in a governmental apparatus that has too long been under ideological assault.