One of these likable dweebs may not be a complete asswipe.
But it isn’t Penn Asswipe Jillette.
I just caught an episode of BULLSHIT in which the dynamic duo was poking fun at the Endangered Species Act. The ESA is complete bullshit apparently because it doesn’t protect animals which may or may not be endangered, rather it protects land to which property rights advocates may feel they are entitled.
The Laurel to this Hardy is silent throughout, so it’s hard to accuse little Teller of the damnable untruths spewed by his well fed partner. This was an unforgivable attack on nature at risk. This was crapola from guys who have shown themselves on other subjects to know better.
Am I being too Politically Correct? Let me show you how PC works. Nothing’s inviolate, fine, but suffer the consequences for making light of defenseless animals in dire need. Nothing you can ever do will redeem you for minimizing the problems of your fellow beings who cannot speak for themselves.
You concluded your segment with Jerry Springer-like soft advice about animals facing extinction: “yes worry about them, but don’t pass laws, that doesn’t help anything.” Really you corporate prigs? You small minded, otherwise hip-sounding, gutless asswipe agents of corporate culture. Nothing you ever have to say will redeem the swill you have pitched here.
“Ninety nine percent of all creatures who’ve ever lived on earth are now extinct.” Really? Isn’t that kinda like saying one hundred percent of everyone who lived before us has died? Not a figure that tells us anything. How about saying, in the span of several billion years for which Earth has been in existance, twenty five percent of all extinctions ever have occured in just the last one hundred years? That might be more helpful, if hopefully also alarming. Yuk yuk.
And then to suggest at the very end of the show, not just that man might someday endanger himself and disappear, but that he might be replaced -ha ha- by one of the species currently endangered, is the height of cynicism. You goddamn twit. You know better, that’s what makes your message damnable. You call Paul Watson an asshole for ramming (illegal) fishing vessels, you accuse the Endangered Species Act proponents of using tear-jerk emotional manipulation, and yet the only example you give of the downside of the ESA is a crippled girl who has to shower outside at her friend’s house because she cannot build on the lot of land she has purchased because it is protected sanctuary for a protected bird.
You couldn’t have been more repulsive if this EPA segment had been satire. Instead you were part of the well-funded corporate lobby against nearly the only tool the environmental movement has ever had. And you portray California Representative Richard Pombo, the congressman with the worst environmental record ever, not to mention being an Abramoff and DeLay crooney, as some kind of folk hero.
It is true that the EPA is less about the species and more about land use control. Of course it is. The real story is why environmentalists cannot fight the corporate rapists on their own terms and have to couch their efforts in the language of saving the species.
By the way, is the Endangered Species Act by some coincidence facing an attack in congress right now? Yes.
