Blame Bush

How would a liberal answer this question?

Who is responsible for the deaths of twelve miners in West Virginia?

Who else?

BUSH.

On Hannity and Colmes, the former director of the National Mine Safety and Health Academy, Jack Spadaro, blamed Bush for the disaster.

Spadoro said, "This mine should have been closed. There were too many serious [safety] violations and the record is very clear."

Spadoro followed this with an explantion as to why this unsafe mine was still operating.

"I think it's because of the current Bush administration's policies toward mine operators and their reluctance to take the strong enforcement action that's sometimes necessary," Spadoro surmised.

According to Spadaro, "there has been a significant change since the Bush administration took over the enforcement of mine safety."

Why politicize this?

If that's what Spadaro wants to do, he'll have to account for the failure of the state government in West Virginia as well. For most of the past twenty-five years, it's been controlled by Democrats.

Naturally, the New York Times and the Washington Post exploited the twelve miners' deaths to attack the Bush Administration.

In a report on Wednesday, the Times wrote about the many safety violations of the Sago mine.

The most serious of these citations are 16 "unwarrantable failure orders," which are problems that an operator knows exist but fails to correct. Thirteen of these orders were issued in the past six months, federal records show.

"Under the Bush administration, the citing of unwarrantable failures has gone down dramatically," said Tony Oppegard, a top federal mine official in the Clinton administration and a former prosecutor of mine-safety violations in Kentucky. "So to see a rash of unwarrantable failures under this administration is a telling sign of a mine with serious safety problems."

Former Clinton man Oppegard also showed up in an article in the Post.

In the past two years, the mine was cited 273 times for safety violations, of which about a third were classified as "significant and substantial," according to documents compiled by the Labor Department's Mine Safety and Health Administration (MSHA). Many were for problems that could contribute to accidental explosions or the collapse of mine tunnels, records show.

In addition, 16 violations logged in the past eight months were listed as "unwarrantable failures," a designation reserved for serious safety infractions for which the operator had either already been warned, or which showed "indifference or extreme lack of care," said Tony Oppegard, a former MSHA senior adviser.

"That is a very high number, and it is usually indicative of a very poor safety record," Oppegard said.

In the same article, another Clinton era official joined in the criticism of the Bush Administration.

J. Davitt McAteer, who headed MSHA during the Clinton administration, said he was troubled by an apparent spike in accidents and violations that occurred beginning about two years ago.

"The violations are not the worst I've ever seen -- and certainly not the best -- but I'm concerned about the trend and the direction they're going in. It's indication to those running the operation that you've got a problem here."

According to the Times and the Post, all aspects of American life were so good during the Clinton Administration and are so awful now. The problem with that view is that it runs counter to reality.

Check out MSHA's mining fatalities stats for the Clinton era and the Bush presidency.

Here and here.

The bar graphs are easy to read.

Clearly, there were more mining fatalities during Clinton's terms than Bush's time in office.

Someone alert the mainstream media and the Clintonistas.

I'm sure they'll quickly retract the misleading statements. They would never intentionally set out to distort the truth, would they?