The Sleeves Off His Vest

This is really a big "screw you" to the environmentalists.

Today Bush designated 200,000 square miles of ocean as protected "national monuments". The designation prevents fishing, drilling, and the like - forever. The designated area includes the Mariana Trench (the deepest part of the ocean - over 7 miles), the Rose Atolls off Samoa and some remote Pacific Islands. Here's the thing: we went to the bottom of the Trench once, in 1958, and haven't been back since. These other places are beautiful of course, but hardly anyone lives there or visits them ... and there are no plans to do any sort of drilling or fishing in these spots. So here's Bush, in an attempt to have some sort of legacy, getting into the record books by protecting a bunch of stuff that doesn't need protecting while acting environmentally irresponsible on every issue that could have used some Presidential leadership. He has no shame.