Charles C. W. Cooke
The Corner
National Review Online
4/26/2012
Free nations that respect the rule of law tend not to make examples of their citizens, much less crucify them. This rule of thumb, however, seems to have been lost on the EPA, an official from which had an interesting analogy to share in a video that has just surfaced:
I was in a meeting once and I gave an analogy to my staff about my philosophy of enforcement, and I think it was probably a little crude and maybe not appropriate for the meeting, but I’ll go ahead and tell you what I said:
It was kind of like how the Romans used to, you know, conquer villages in the Mediterranean. They’d go in to a little Turkish town somewhere, they’d find the first five guys they saw and they’d crucify them.
Then, you know, that town was really easy to manage for the next few years. And so you make examples out of people who are in this case not compliant with the law. Find people who are not compliant with the law, and you hit them as hard as you can and you make examples out of them, and there is a deterrent effect there.
Note that the speaker, Region VI administrator Al Armendariz, considered his words not to be inappropriate for a government agency to think or do but to say at a “meeting.”…
…In a statement released today, [Senator Jim Inhofe] noted that,
with an election on the horizon, President Obama is pretending to be a friend of oil and natural gas, claiming he’s for an ‘all-of-the-above’ approach, but Administrator Armendariz’s comments reveal the true story: while President Obama has photo ops in front of pipelines in Oklahoma, his E.P.A. is working aggressively to ‘crucify’ oil and gas producers so they can end hydraulic fracturing, knowing full well that if you stop hydraulic fracturing, you kill domestic oil and gas production.
Senator Inhofe has promised an investigation into the EPA, and confirmed that the apology will not deter him from conducting one.
The complete article is at National Review Online and includes video of both Mr. Armendariz and Senator Inhofe.
Update: Several writers in NRO’s comment section educate other readers by reminding us that “the Turks did not reach the Mediterranean until after the fall of Rome. Maybe he meant the Byzantines?”
Just FYI…
Update 2: Who didn’t see this coming? Video Of EPA Chief Talking About Crucifying Businesses Taken Down By Liberal Group
Update 3: EPA ‘crucify’ official received $540k in federal taxpayer-funded research grants
Update 4: More than half of congressmen in EPA Region 6 seek removal of ‘crucify them’ official
Also, Does The EPA Have An Opening In Its Human Experiments Section?
This is a very serious and outrageous story. It brings on alternating waves of anger and embarrassment. The Environmental Protection Agency has used human beings, our fellow Americans, as experimental lab rats! Yes, they have purposely exposed people, our neighbors, to high levels of airborne “particulate matter – soot and dust known as PM2.5. If it were not for the diligent work of JunkScience.com, we would not have heard about this. Using a Freedom of Information Act application, JS.com has discovered what the EPA has done and has told us all about it. Naturally, the Democrat cheerleaders in the media covered this up. The revelation about these Dr. Menegele-type experiments conducted under the supervision of EPA Administrator Lisa P. Jackson are chilling. In order to build a portfolio of evidence against coal fired energy plants that Obama can cite to shut them down, the EPA had 41 people breathe in dangerous soot to see if they would die…
“Crucify Them”: The Obama Way …The goal isn’t a cleaner environment. The goal is political incitement of fear…
