My brand new book "A Disgrace to the Profession" deals with one example of what can happen when opportunists and shysters exploit the public's concern for the environmental well-being of the planet. On my weekly radio appearance with Hugh Hewitt, Hugh asked me about another - Colorado's Animas River, poisoned by the Environmental Protection Agency:
HUGH HEWITT: If there's ever been a more obvious example of what the federal government delivers, it's a yellow river full of lead at levels that will kill people if they drink enough of it.
MARK STEYN: Yeah, yeah – "Yellow River," that was a big hit for Lou Christie I think in the early '70s. That really is a great record [SEE NOTE BELOW]... The lesson of the IRS is that if you said to the IRS what they say to their congressional investigators, you'd go to jail. In other words, if you were to say to them, "Well sorry, I lost all the paperwork and accidentally deleted it and the server's broken and there's no way I can get it back", you'd go to jail if you were to say to the IRS what the IRS said to congressional investigators... Now we learn it's exactly the same thing with the EPA: what happened to British Petroleum is not gonna happen to the guys who run the EPA. And that's the way it is with every government bureaucracy. They impose rules on you that they don't live by...
HH: Now I wanna do a test on my audience if they know the name Shaun McGrath. Shaun McGrath turns out to be the regional administrator of the EPA, formerly the mayor of Boulder. He joined the Obama administration as the deputy director of Intergovernmental Affairs at the White House in January of 2009. He is a political hack just like the OPM director Katherine Archuleta was a political hack. And Gina McCarthy didn't show up at the "Yellow River" for a week. She's running EPA. Remember the heck-of-a-job Brownie – remember after Katrina when it wasn't even Bush's fault that the mayor and the governor couldn't get their acts together? This is a – they actually caused it! They punched the hole in the dyke, Mark! And no one knows the name or the fact that they're political hacks from Team Obama.
MS: No, I know! And you know, the funny thing about it is all the people that I hear from because I'm in a big climate lawsuit at the moment. So I get hammered as a denier by all the usual people – the people that know the name of every Koch brother. The people who find if there's some Zeppo Koch sitting on the board of some obscure NPR affiliate in the middle of nowhere – we'll bombard NPR to demand that Zeppo Koch be removed from the board of advisors to the NPR affiliate. None of them are advertising these names. It's the usual big climate mafia's code of omerta. They all circle the wagons around the guilty bureaucrats...
HH: This really fits with your new book, "A Disgrace to the Profession", because it is a disgrace to the profession. Your argument with Michael Mann on climate – here we have a real example where there are twelve thousand times the lawful levels of lead in this river now headed towards Mexico and Utah. People could get really sick doing this, but we have no coverage, yet we're worried about the mythical rise of the oceans fifty years from now because the former was done by the Left on the orders by the Left in an attempt to take over the clean-up of Colorado mines and the other is a hypothetical imaginary threat that benefits the agenda of the Left. I don't think it's ever been this obvious to people.
Hugh then suggested that I hold a book signing for "A Disgrace To The Profession" at the upcoming Paris climate conference. I liked that idea:
MS: The last time I was in a big court case, the judges rebuked me for autographing books in the well of the court. Needless to say, that only encouraged me to order up an extra pallet. And I would be happy to do the same thing at the big Paris climate conference.
We'll have more on "A Disgrace To The Profession" a little later today.
Hugh and I also discussed the slow, remorseless degeneration of Hillary 2016:
MS: We have a presidential candidate who's under criminal investigation. Bernie Sanders is ahead in New Hampshire. I think he'll hold that lead - and at some point, the question is whether the Democratic Party wants to slide off the cliff with Mrs. Clinton on this..
.HH: Mark Steyn, always a pleasure. Steynonline.com! Go get his brand-new book. Order ten copies... "A Disgrace to the Profession". Spread it around to your climate-fearing friends. Stay tuned.
You can find the full interview with Hugh here. By the way, Bernie Sanders is not someone to be underestimated. Newt agrees with my assessment here.
~CRINGE-MAKING ERRORS DEPARTMENT: Alas, I made one horrible mistake right at the top of Hugh's show. I credited the hit song "Yellow River" to the incorrect Christie minstrel. Dan Hollombe of Los Angeles was first to expose my utter lack of credibility:
Hello Mark,
I just heard your Hugh Hewitt interview. One correction: The 1970 hit 'Yellow River' was by a Yorkshire lad named Jeff Christie, who is of no relation whatsoever to Lou Christie (who is from Pittsburgh).
I may have to retire in shame. In mitigation, I was thinking the other day about the late Peter Callander, who was a lovely man and delightful company but who nonetheless wrote some of the worst pop songs of the Sixties and Seventies ("Billy, Don't Be A Hero"). On the other hand, he also wrote "Avenues and Alleyways", which is one of those faintly ridiculous over-ripe numbers that's very hard to resist. And I was in the mood for it to so I asked a passing minion to rustle up "Avenues and Alleyways" by Jeff Christie, and she reported back that it was in fact by Tony Christie. So I was making a subconscious effort with Hugh not to confuse Jeff Christie with Tony Christie and instead wound up confusing him with Lou Christie. It would have been a lot easier if they'd all married McGuire Sisters.
~Tomorrow afternoon, Saturday, I'll be north of the border to plug "A Disgrace To The Profession" with my favorite piano-playing imam Andrew Green, live on The Roy Green Show coast to coast across Canada. Details in our On The Air box at top right.
