Bush Is Leaving Office--and Taking the ESA with Him

by Stephanie Ernst

Published November 20, 2008 @ 06:26AM PST

You're enormously unpopular, at home and abroad; your successor is widely adored, at home and perhaps even more abroad; and you have just a couple short months left to cement your legacy. What to do? What to do? Well, if you're George W. Bush, the answer is apparently easy: take your frustrations out on endangered animals and plants. If you're going to go down as reckless and inept and as the worst-ever-in-history president, you might as well embrace that fate and give it all you've got at the end, right? I mean, you want everyone to feel the damage you can do--right down to the wildlife who are barely holding on to existence and who might one day interfere with big business plans. Who are they to stand in the way of progress? Who are they to think they're entitled to something as silly and trivial as "habitat"? Am I right?

You, Almost Not President Bush, are a fair and equitable president. You are no speciesist. You're not going to screw over millions of humans and leave nonhumans out. No siree. Those animals can expect the same treatment their human cousins have been getting. In fact, you'll take it one step further--you'll disregard nonhuman animals and their interests even more.

Instinctively, I wanted to end this post with one word on one line:

Jackass.

But of course, I can't do that; as an animal rights advocate, I do my absolute best to avoid ever using a comparison to an animal as an insult--it is more an insult to the animal than it is to the human you're trying to cut down (to be discussed in a future post). So I pondered what other name I could call him--to whom or what would I personally least want to be compared? What embodies arrogance, shortsightedness, destructiveness, incompetence, broad offensiveness, and so much more? And then it came to me:

Bush.

Coulter was a close second.

Related links:

• Telegraph.co.uk: George W Bush may lift protections on endangered animals and plants
• New Yorker: Midnight Hour (quote: "What distinguishes this Administration in its final days—as in its earlier ones—is the purity of its cynicism. White House officials haven’t even bothered to argue that these new rules are in the public interest. Such a claim would, in any event, be impossible to defend, as just about every midnight regulation being proposed is, evidently, a gift to a favored industry.")
• AP: Dems look to stop endangered species rule changes