Atomic-holes

Flint & Frum -- Complicit A-Holes

Lobbyists, pundits and  think-tank shills routinely escape taking responsibility or paying the price for either being obscenely wrong or for pushing for causes they know to be obscenely wrong [“Free markets will regulate themselves!” “Once we invade Iraq, democracy will flourish!”].  It is galling that these people are allowed to spew their toxic propaganda with impunity especially when it is hard to believe that they are not aware of the criminal negligence inherent in their words. On the heels of the snowballing nuclear disaster in Japan, the atomic lobby has released a  rapid response team into the media and the halls of Congress with a fervor usually reserved for fighting actual nuclear meltdowns. These creatures however, are not fighting to save lives, but to save $360 billion in Federal loan guarantees.

Yesterday,  I absorbed a fair amount of nuclear poisoning from both tv and the radio. CNN covered a day in the life of Alex Flint, a lobbyist for the Nuclear Energy Institute, as he ran around Washington putting out anti-nuclear fires. He held a closed information meeting which 150 members of Congress attended and spent the rest of the morning sitting directly behind Department of Energy Secretary Steven Chu as he testified before Congress. One of the talking head type A-holes, David Frum, speaking on Marketplace, even used the conceit that he just bought stock in uranium shares on the grounds that, “If the danger from this shock is contained, nuclear will have passed its most extreme test.”

Frum’s commentary is not just wrongheaded but also criminal. Forget the growing fear  that nuclear will NOT pass this test, and the horrible dread we are all beginning to feel that Japan will, literally, be living with the fallout from this catastrophe for decades. Even if all radioactive leakage were to stop this instant, there is no way to know that this will be nuclear’s  “most  extreme test.” Of course that is the biggest problem with nuclear energy.

Nuclear energy should not be allowed to continue as it is currently constituted precisely because the consequences of an accident at a nuclear power plant are so dire and because the world is fraught with so many “unknown unknowns.” What if instead of targeting the World Trade Center, the 9/11 hijackers had aimed their jets 70 miles north at the Indian Point Nuclear facility? Or what if, oh I dunno’, there’s an earthquake in California [that’s kind of a known known]? Or what if....well, you get the idea.

Later in his chat, Frum goes on to say that  “the principal alternative to nuclear power is coal, and that the hazards of coal are less spectacular than the hazards of nuclear, in just the same way that the hazards of driving are less spectacular than the hazards of flying.” When Frum, a seemingly intelligent man [he used to write economic speeches for George W. Bush] starts tossing around such specious syllogisms, I begin to speculate that perhaps he bought those uranium shares with money from the uranium industry and notions of true criminality dance through my head.

Freedom of speech is a hallowed and inalienable right, but you still can’t yell “Fire!” in a crowded theater or, in this case, “No Fire!” in a nuclear meltdown.