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| The "new" Rick Scott |
One would think
Rick Scott has become a chameleon and turned a verdant green over his newfound
appreciation for all things environmental.
But only those least jaundiced by his past sins against it might find
his new costume even remotely believable.
The more politically astute will know that it’s just election-year smoke
and rebranding, the typical re-striping that occurs every election cycle. There has been no internal epiphany. There has been no deep revelation. There has been no newly acquired knowledge-based
appreciation for natural Florida. This
man has not changed and those who might be fooled into thinking so, will be suffering just
that. Aristotle noted that the chameleon’s
“change
of color takes place over the whole body,” but changes not the animal’s
interior or behavior.
Such devious
strategy just might work, however, because the voting public is so gullible on
the one hand and starved for something good to happen on the other. After having experienced the last three years
of his fumbling and disastrous attempts to manage the complex problems of this state,
it just may be ready to believe anything.
The reality is, this
sudden acknowledgement of problems environmentalists have been frantically trying
to educate him and his cadre of hard-core anti-environment minions about is nothing
more than a carefully constructed tactic to deflect criticism coming from both
environmentalists and like-minded democrats.
The brilliance of it is that instead of using his own ill-gotten money to
molt his public persona he now has hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars at
his disposal to do it.
Are we really to believe
he has suddenly gained a legitimate appreciation for what The Everglades actually
represents to Florida? Remember, this is
the guy who decimated the local sponsor of the Federal project that interfaces
directly with the United States Corps of Engineers and the myriad of interests involved. The South Florida Water Management District
is singularly the only tool the state had that could field the machinery,
generate the dollars through its ad valorem taxing authority, and focus the
minds of the phalanx of scientists needed to get this complex job done with any
level of competence. And yet, he
destroyed the district’s leadership, cut through its scientific staff with a
slingblade and without any apparent responsible thought, hacked through cartilage
and muscle to the very bones of its budget. It is a whimpering, weak shadow of
its former self. With over a thousand
years of institutional memory summarily fired, its capacity to properly
maintain and operate safely the dozens of structures and canals, much less the state’s
enormous responsibilities to improve the degraded “Glades” from its sad state,
is in question.
The real Scott is still
very much beneath his nouveau-green skin.
He is also now proposing – callously
– to throw hundreds of millions of your tax dollars at the state’s iconic, world-renown
freshwater springs. After three years of
blistering criticism from the environmental community and a rising chorus of outrage
from even the most casually concerned, Scott is seeing his re-election in serious
jeopardy. So now he wants the
legislature to hurry up and fix the almost irreversible damage these rare and
unique hydrologic phenomena have suffered.
How obvious can he get! And how
eagerly some have praised his vainglorious and thinly veiled attempts to look
different than he will always be, an inept guy who cannot distinguish between
special interests and those of the public or those of a state whose future depends
absolutely upon a fine understanding of the differences. Surely, their praise can be no more sincere
than his newly found concern for natural Florida.
