Word: watt
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EVERY TIME be opens his mouth, Interior Secretary James Watt--the Elmer Fudd look-alike who wants to turn America's wilderness into an ecological charnel house--provides fresh proof that he is about as fit to run the Interior Department as your average fox is to guard a chicken coop...
...Watt's remarks in two interviews made public last week were no exception to this rule. On the cable TV program "Conservative Counterpoint," Watt claimed that Indian reservations exemplify the failures of Russian-style socialism. Watt argued that Indians' dependence on government handouts explain the reservations' high rates of alcoholism, unemployment, and venereal disease...
Some Indian leaders welcomed Watt's recognition that the reservations face series problems. But most were puzzled by the Secretary's omission of some decidedly non-socialist government actions that have contributed to the American Indian's troubles over the year--from the warfare and broken treaties of the 1800's to the present Administration's cutbacks in Indian housing, health, and nutrition programs...
Even more bizarre was Watt's assertion in a recent Business Week interview that the American environmentalist movement is a totalitarian front. In Watt's view, environmentalists only pretend to care about fish, fowl, and forests. Their more sinister real purpose is to bring "central planning" to the American economy and to "subordinate the dignity of man." It's night-malish vision to be sure--just imagine Woodsy the Owl in jackboots with a club--but a little improbable...
However, some Indian leaders said yesterday after seeing Watt's full remarks that they supported many of the things he said...