{"id":178959,"date":"2018-07-07T18:18:00","date_gmt":"2018-07-07T23:18:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/2018\/07\/07\/the-meaning-of-scott-pruitt\/"},"modified":"2018-07-07T18:18:00","modified_gmt":"2018-07-07T23:18:00","slug":"the-meaning-of-scott-pruitt","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/2018\/07\/07\/the-meaning-of-scott-pruitt\/","title":{"rendered":"The Meaning of Scott Pruitt"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>As everyone knows by now, <a href=\"https:\/\/www.bloomberg.com\/news\/articles\/2018-07-06\/pruitt-said-to-have-been-told-to-resign-in-call-from-white-house\">Scott Pruitt was fired by Trump after a spate of really cheesy scandals<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p>There is a precedent, the tenure of Anne Gorsuch Burford, head of the EPA from 1981 to 1983.<\/p>\n<p>What happened then, and what is happening now is very similar:&nbsp; You have a very public, and not particularly competent, <i>b\u00eate noire<\/i>, who has people screaming, and the press covering their misdeeds obsessively, but this is largely a diversion.<\/p>\n<p>While we have been looking at Pruitt&#8217;s cone of silence, his sweetheart deal with his landlord, his using staff for personal errands, etc., Trump and his Evil Minions<sup>\u2122<\/sup> were forcing out senior career civil servants and replacing then with &#8220;burrows&#8221; who are implacably opposed to the mission of the EPA, demoralizing the whole staff, and shredding the organization.<\/p>\n<p>His tenure was as long as it was because it was sufficient to achieve the underlying goals.<\/p>\n<p>Once that was done, he was expendible.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>As everyone knows by now, Scott Pruitt was fired by Trump after a spate of really cheesy scandals. There is a precedent, the tenure of Anne Gorsuch Burford, head of the EPA from 1981 to 1983. What happened then, and what is happening now is very similar:&nbsp; You have a very public, and not particularly &hellip;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[573,450,484,364,374,437,454],"class_list":["post-178959","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","tag-donald-trump","tag-employment","tag-environment","tag-evil","tag-politics","tag-regulation","tag-white-house"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/178959"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=178959"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/178959\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=178959"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=178959"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=178959"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}