While shilling for drilling during last week’s Senate debate over the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska) claimed that oil development would have a negligible effect on the area: “When we talk about the roadless areas we have available for exploration, we mean it. We do mean that we are going to put down an ice road that will disappear when the summer comes.”
Bizarrely, as Felicity Barringer of The New York Times points out, roadless might not mean what you think it means.
“[T]he term ‘roadless’ does not mean an absence of roads,” Interior Department officials wrote in a recent environmental impact statement about drilling in another region of Alaska. “Rather, it indicates an attempt to minimize the construction of permanent roads.”
The sheer inventiveness of the Bushies’ Orwellian contortions is awe-inspiring.
