With each conservative cabinet pick, the media freaks out and does their best to characterize each person as a radical extremist instead of just, well, a consistent conservative. Oklahoma Attorney General Scott Pruitt was next in line for the media to attack, as Trump picked the critic of excessive government regulation to head the Environmental Protection Agency. On Thursday, the liberal women at The View were quick to bash the “horrible pick” as someone who was going to leave the United States in an apocalyptic wasteland filled with polluted air and dirty water.
Whoopi Goldberg introduced the discussion by chuckling as she read off a brief biography of Pruitt and his record fighting the EPA’s regulations in Oklahoma. Co-host Joy Behar blasted the pick as a “horrible” before hyperventilating that Pruitt was going to make everyone breathe polluted air and drink dirty water once he got into office.
JOY BEHAR: Why don't they just call it the environmental pollution agency instead of the environmental protection agency because he is going to dismantle everything in place -- the air you breathe, the water you drink. I mean, what he's done in Oklahoma is not that great either. I don't understand why he met with Al Gore, what was the purpose of that?
Co-host Jedediah Bila was the only one on the panel to push back against Behar’s exaggeration. She argued that Pruitt, as Oklahoma’s AG, had fought for the interests of the people in that state, noting that “a quarter of all jobs in Oklahoma are tied to the energy industry.” She added, that didn’t mean that he would run the EPA like he ran Oklahoma.
BILA: The Attorney General in Oklahoma is responsible for doing what's best for the people of Oklahoma. Just some reminders, a quarter of all jobs in Oklahoma are tied to the energy industry. This is a guy-- his job has been to protect energy related jobs. So there's no guarantee that what he's been doing in Oklahoma is what he's going to do for the whole country. The argument about the environment is not always about, “Ok we don’t care about the environment. This guy doesn't care about the environment.” What he has said on many occasions is it's not a federal issue, it's a state issue. The reason is, you have this bureaucracy in Washington, this EPA that makes rules for the entire country and that bureaucracy is not in touch with what's going on in these individual states sometimes.
Behar snarked, “So wait a minute, the air in Oklahoma doesn't go over to the next state?” before blaming the state’s 907 recorded earthquakes in 2015 solely on Pruitt.
BEHAR: Okay. There were 907 earthquakes in Oklahoma last year and they say they were caused by the oil and gas production. How is he helping Oklahoma?
BILA: Who says?
BEHAR: The EPA I guess.
