OPINION:
The Obama administration has hit a new low in race-obsessed government. The post-racial president can’t even fight bedbugs without affirmative action.
Last week, the Environmental Protection Agency announced to “environmental justice” advocacy groups that the agency plans to spend more than a half-million dollars battling the bedtime pests in “communities disproportionately exposed to environmental harms and risk.” That’s bureaucratese for minority communities.
If bigoted bugs were singling out blacks, Hispanics and American Indians, liberals might have a rational reason for working harder to protect them, but in New York, where bedbugs have gone big-time, they are hitting the rich as well as the poor, black and white alike. After all, we taste the same. That’s one reason the critters have been dubbed “Bloombugs” - for the famously rich Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg who has been so ineffective in fighting the plague of bloodthirsty insects.
President Obama’s plan is even worse than Mr. Bloomberg’s flailing. This ill-considered EPA grant program is a microcosm of what has made Americans so angry with our government. It is an expensive effort to solve a government-created problem, destined to fail in its purpose while dividing Americans along the very racial lines we’re spending untold billions to erase.
Bedbugs are an ancient scourge already solved by modern science - powerful pesticides developed during the first half of the 20th century. But acting on dubious environmental concerns, federal regulators banned or restricted the chemicals that previously had freed New Yorkers and other Americans of all races from the nocturnal beasts. Since those restrictions, bedbugs slowly have been re-establishing themselves in their cozy enclaves until they finally have burst back into the national consciousness.
You can bet that even though we know exactly how to rid ourselves of our creepy-crawly problem, the EPA is going to spend this money on other things entirely, ignoring a good solution to seek a perfect one. Meanwhile, Americans lose our patience, our money - and now our blood - one drop at a time.
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