Christine Todd Faces The Music

Christine Todd Whitman, yet another disgraced Republican from her time in the Bush Fourthbranch Administration, had quite a day on Capitol Hill.

Ex-EPA chief Christie Whitman was bombarded by boos and a host of accusations Monday at a hearing into her assurances that it had been safe to breathe the air around the fallen World Trade Center.

The confrontation between the former head of the Environmental Protection Agency and her critics grew heated at times. Some members of the audience shouted in anger, only to be gaveled down by Rep. Jerrold Nadler, D-N.Y., who chaired the hearing.

For three hours Whitman faced charges from Nadler and others that the Environmental Protection Agency's public statements after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks gave people a false sense of safety.

Whitman maintained the government warned those working on the toxic debris pile to use respirators, while elsewhere in lower Manhattan the air was safe to the general public.

The government "warned" people to use respirators, that was the whole problem, even if her story is true. They ought to have mandated it to protect the volunteers. But the EPA and the city of New York clearly wanted to project an "everything's normal" sensibility, and didn't even keep tabs on who was going in and coming out of Ground Zero during the cleanup. The directive was to get it done as quickly as possible, and damn the consequences.

There was at least a measure of accountability today, with Whitman not only facing Congress but dozens of Ground Zero rescue workers, 70% of whom contracted severe illness as a result of breathing in that fetid air. What Whitman and the Admnistration did, their claims that everything was fine and nothing was toxic in the days after several 1970s-era buildings were reduced to dust in Lower Manhattan, is nearly criminal.

This part was poetic:

Dozens of activists and Sept. 11 rescue workers came to the hearing, and some in the audience hissed when Whitman said she felt former Mayor Rudy Giuliani's administration "did absolutely everything in its power to do what was right" in handling the health concerns.

The truth is he was callous and unfeeling. And if he gets that Republican nomination, there will be rescue workers, volunteers, firemen, and 9-11 families nipping at his heels. As I've said many times, it'll make the Swift Boaters look like a tea party.