How Imus Resembles the MMS, and Other Tales From Major Garrett

Imus got right down to business with Fox’s Chief White House Correspondent Major Garrett today, asking him why the White House was releasing 160,000 pages of Elena Kagan’s records from her time working for the Clinton administration.

“It means the Republicans haven’t found anything yet, and they’re hoping to find something within her work for the Clinton White House, because when you look in the Clinton White House, things tend to pop up,” said Garrett, pun probably not intended.

He doubts that the Republicans, so far devoid of any dirt on Supreme Court Nominee Kagan, will find much; Kagan worked for Bruce Reed, a former domestic policy advisor and “about as straight-laced as anyone who ever worked for the Clinton White House.”

Kagan’s clean-as-a-whistle record offers little entertainment, so Imus moved on to a situation rife with scandal: the ongoing—and as yet unstoppable—oil leak in the gulf. Imus has changed his position from “What was the White House supposed to do? BP said they had everything under control,” to “The administration should have assumed they were lying.”

Garrett pointed out that the law of unintended consequence plays a role, too. In the wake of the Exxon Valdez oil spill in 1989, Congress passed legislation mandating that the polluter, or in this case “the spiller,” pay for everything associated with cleaning up the disaster, and use their wherewithal and their technology to stop it.

“When you put the company responsible in charge of all those things early on,” said Garrett. “You are dependent entirely on what they tell you and what they do. We’re probably going to revisit that now.”

He further observed that it was under President Obama’s watch that the Interior Department excluded BP from providing either an environmental impact statement or a response statement for their now failed Deepwater Horizon project. Had BP been made to do both, said Garrett, “There would have been a much better and more orchestrated response plan from the moment BP said there was a leak.”

Imus supposed that the Bush administration was similarly lax, and Garrett provided they had actually been worse. “Why do I have to drag that out of you?” Imus wondered.  

Laughing, Garrett further bashed Bush by disclosing that during his administration, the regulators from Mineral Management Services attended sex parties, took drugs, and went on illegal trips with all sorts of oil industry executives.

Said Imus, “Sounds like me in the 80s.”

Several big primaries will take place tomorrow, and Garrett predicted that Sen. Blanche Lincoln (D-Ark.) would win her primary; Sen. Arlen Spector (D-Pa.) would lose his; and that Sen. Mitch McConell’s influence in Kenucky Republican politics is too great for his candidate, Trey Grayson, to lose to Ron Paul’s son, Rand Paul. About that race, he said, “It’ll be very, very close, and that will be a shock to the Republican establishment.”

Imus’s only—and, it must be said, rather profound—comment was this: “We hope you’re wrong on all of them.”

-Julie Kanfer