Have you ever extracted so much satisfaction from something it was considered overindulgence? Your picture of indulgence might be a triple-layered chocolate cake. Maybe it’s a prime cut steak from a four-star restaurant. Or, perhaps it’s an all expenses covered tropical two-week vacation. Pure indulgence for me is when I learn of an extreme-right politician who has been uncovered as being a complete hypocrite.
The best example is the homophobic male politician who is discovered to be having an affair with a man. But that’s only equivalent to one piece of cake. Scott Pruitt’s scandals are equal to a three-tiered chocolate cake decorated with all the fudge in the universe.
In case you’ve been sleeping under a rock, in the middle of Greenland or in the middle of a blizzard, Scott Pruitt is (or was, let me check Trump’s Twitter feed) the Environmental Protection Agency Administrator. However, recently he has been embroiled in a multitude of scandals. Here are some of them:
- He flies first class regularly and bears no expense when doing so.
- Last December, he took several staffers and a security team on a $40,000 trip to Morocco.
- Pruitt included three times as many more security guards as the former EPA administrator, directing them to follow him everywhere he went.
- Pruitt instructed the use of sirens for his motorcade. One of the trips was to a Le Diplomate, a French restaurant with 4-stars on Yelp in case you were wondering.
- Pruitt built a security booth so he could hold private conversations with his team, which cost approximately $43,000.
- Pruitt rented a room co-owned by the wife of the head of Williams & Jensen, an energy lobbyist organization. He was charged $50 for rent, paying only for the days he stayed there. Fun fact: the condo owner changed the locks to keep Pruitt out after he overstayed his welcome.
- Pruitt used an obscure rule in the Safe Drinking Water Act to increase the salaries of two aides by 33 and 52 percent. This was after rejection of the raises from the White House where Trump “works.”
I would like to say that I would certainly be tempted to trade all morals for a $40,000 vacation to Morocco. But I am a college student currently milking his dining plan for all it’s worth. Pruitt, in comparison, is a conservative who is a part of the “drain the swamp” administration. Perhaps draining the swamp involves filling it back up with the toxic sludge created by the deregulatory policy Pruitt is pursuing. I know — that burn was almost as destructive as the forest fires made more likely because of anthropogenic climate change Pruitt is exacerbating.
But I digress. Pruitt should certainly resign. He shouldn’t continue to fly first class on United Airlines. I mean who wants to be fired by a tweet that most likely includes two typos, three misspellings and an all-encompassing lie at either six in the morning or eleven at night.
The media has served its country as the fourth estate during this time. Republicans in Congress clearly cannot fathom that oversight means oversight of Democrats AND Republicans. It seems like much too hard of a concept for the parties to grasp. Therefore, some great reporting as taken the oversight role.
In the meanwhile, let’s keep the pressure on Pruitt. I forgot to mention this before. That extremely expensive Morocco trip was on the taxpayers’ dime because he was touting America’s liquefied natural gas (LNG) exports. Not only is that not in his purview, but also that’s the only exporter of LNG is represented by Williams & Jensen, the lobbyist company tied to Pruitt’s sweet rental deal.
I told you these scandals were an entire cake’s worth of indulgence. The corruption and hypocrisy are almost too good to be true, almost being the key word here.
