“So, uh, what was the last straw for Pruitt? Was he
caught actually robbing the treasury?”—Former Obama White House speechwriter and
“Pod Save America” political commentator Jon Favreau, tweet of July 5, 2018
From now on, the phrase “Swamp Thing” will not be associated
with a comic-book anti-hero but with the just-departed and completely
unlamented head of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), Scott Pruitt. Any one of the scandals
that erupted on a weekly, sometimes daily basis on his watch would have
resulted in an immediate dismissal in any other administration, but was
tolerated for a year and a half by President Trump.
The American public, bless its heart, forgets rather
quickly matters and people that once consumed its attention. For the sake of
history, then, I urge you, Faithful Reader, to read—and commit as much to
memory as possible—the litany of Pruitt’s offenses expertly summarized by New York Magazine’s Lisa Ryan.
If you are in
the workplace long enough, as I have been, you encounter, sooner or later,
someone who, despite a relatively short amount of time in a post—say, up to a
year and a half—still manages to do untold damage to an institution. Such, I
am afraid, is the case with Pruitt. Even Ms. Ryan’s helpful list does not
itemize the number of longtime employees driven out of the EPA for running
afoul of the DC Swamp Thing.
Those people are not the only ones who suffered
because of their terminations. So has their country, which can badly afford the
loss of experts on the one crucial legacy we can leave the following
generations: our environment. As noted by
Alexander Kaufman for The Huffington Post, all signs point toward his
replacement, Andrew Wheeler, being even worse.
If that’s really possible…
