Back in June reports came out suggesting that Secretary of the Interior Ken Salazar had lied in a report on the Gulf Coast spill by claiming that a panel of outside exports had peer-reviewed the report’s conclusions, which included a job-killing moratorium on offshore drilling.  After this came out, the Interior Secretary had to retract and disavow any nefarious intent on the administration’s behalf; and you could have believed as much of that disavowal as you liked.  Given that this White House purely hates offshore drilling and jumped at the chance to reverse course on the topic, it was reasonable enough not to believe a word of it.

Well, it’s now confirmed, via an Inspector General’s investigation, that the language in question was actually changed by a staffer to White House energy adviser Carol Browner.  This makes sense; Browner is a notorious Greenie who took advantage of the Gulf Coast oil spill to do a little empire building.  That the report just happened to get manipulated in such a way as to make it appear that the industry consensus supported an immediate moratorium on offshore drilling, and that it just happened to be manipulated by the office of the one staffer whose agenda would be advanced by a moratorium, is being treated as a… coincidence, apparently.  You see, nobody’s admitting any wrongdoing, which is expected to be treated as evidence that there wasn’t any.  And you can believe as much of that as you like, too.

Meanwhile, one Congressman estimated that we lost 12,000 jobs and about 1.8 billion dollars in revenue in the Gulf.  But Browner got the President’s Blackberry number, so: even trade, right?

Moe Lane (crosspost)