Correcting & Questioning Pat Leahy

I know it’s full-on rah-rah time around here with regards to your beloved Democrats – I mean, even Wes Hamilton has thrown himself into the mix – but I hope there’s also a little room for something a little closer to reality. And here’s something to ask ourselves as Vermonters: Is Pat Leahy all there? Or are we slowly working our way down the same path that saw Jim Jeffords be sent out to pasture a few years ago?

Personally, I think it’s fair to ask these questions. And here are a few tidbits to back up my concerns about Pat Leahy’s health and wellbeing.

This morning on the Mark Johnson show, Senator Leahy sounded confused on a number of occasions. While discussing Vermont Yankee, for example, Leahy repeatedly referred to the “Nuclear Regulatory Commission” (NRC) as the “NRSC.”

No big deal, really — if it was done once. But Leahy did it several times, all as part of a rather bizarre explanation to Johnson that he “didn’t have a position” on whether or not to close the Vermont Yankee. Johnson clearly sensed the oddity that Leahy didn’t have a position and kept pushing him on it. And Leahy kept insisting that the safety questions needed to be answered and that he had “asked the NRSC to look into it.”

After a commercial break, Leahy noted that he had been made aware of a mistake in his language, continuing: “I meant NRC, the National Regulatory Commission.”

Um, Senator, that would be (again): “The Nuclear Regulatory Commission.”

Yikes.

A caller or two later wanted to know Leahy’s position on “Community Policing.”

Leahy’s initial response: “I don’t know about immunity policing.”

After Johnson informed him that the caller said, “community policing,” Leahy declared that he hadn’t heard of “community policing,” either.

“I’m shocked you haven’t heard of it,” said Johnson.

But then came the commercials, including one by Leahy and his wife about organic agriculture in which Leahy’s campaign makes the assertion that organic agriculture was started in Vermont and that Leahy’s efforts to standardize national organic standards led to a sort of exportation of Vermont’s organic agriculture.

Leahy’s wife even goes so far as to say that they wanted “the rest of the nation to have access to the same kinds of organic food that Vermonters had.”

First of all, the original existence of pesticide-free food happened long before Vermont learned to market itself. It was, after all, how ALL foods were grown before the domination of the petro-chemical giants decided to monopolize and otherwise industrialize the basic necessity of food – worldwide.

But even if you let Leahy off the hook on this rather nitpicking piece of evidence, he’d be snagged pretty well on the reality that the need and push for national organic standards had nothing to do with Vermont. For those of us involved in the organic standards battles of the 1990s, we know that the driving force behind them weren’t quaint Vermont organic farms – most of whom wanted nothing to do with federal standards – but, rather, the gigantic California organic farms, the increasingly monopolistic retailers like the anti-union “Whole Foods,” and the corporate food giants like Kellogg’s, etc. who were looking for regulatory cover to enter (read: control) the booming organics market.

But let’s live for a moment longer in the Leahy land of organic make believe. If, as the Leahy ad wants us to believe, that Vermonters were the creators and glorifiers of organic agriculture for the nation and world, how do you explain that the top three agriculturally related products in Vermont – Ben & Jerry’s, Cabot Creamery, and Green Mountain Coffee – are not even organic?

Leahy logic: Fail.

Worse, when activists like Food & Water made attempts to point out that Ben & Jerry’s farmers were (and continue to be) swimming in the use of the cancer-causing Atrazine on their non-organic feed corn, politicians like Leahy ran to their defense. Similarly, Leahy ran to the defense of the Cabot Creamery’s use of the Monsanto Corporation’s rBGH – a most non-organic practice, for sure.

Which is all to say: I think we need to be asking Pat Leahy about his recent health check-ups. Is he, for example, all there? Because his public pronouncements and mangling of the simple facts leads this voter to think otherwise.  

5 thoughts on “Correcting & Questioning Pat Leahy

  1. Dan is strong on health care as a human right. He’s also strong on special interest money.

    His support for war in Afghanistan may turn some off, but Leahy was not effective in opposing war in Iraq.

    Of course, if Dan polls more than 20% of the vote, Len Britton could be our new senator….

  2. And I don’t think it was the way you represented it.

    When the caller asked about community policing, he prefaced the question with a question about whether Leahy believed in individual rights or group rights, and then he asked him how he felt about something that sounded to me like “unity policing”. The caller had a bad connection and was painfully inarticulate. He could never give any kind of answer about what he meant by what eventually came out as community policing, what he thought was wrong with it, or what he thought it had to do with his question about individual rights vs. group rights.

    It’s not fair to hold Leahy to a standard of having to give a coherent answer to an incoherent question, especially when he was obviously trying to avoid telling the caller that he didn’t know what the hell he was talking about.

    I didn’t hear the rest, but I hear people screw up initialisms so frequently that it doesn’t bother me when they do.

    I didn’t hear the organic food question (there are only so many driving minutes between Burlington and Waterbury, sorry).

  3. Leahy clearly meant that the organics movement as we know it started in VT. It’s also clear that you don’t understand national farm policy very well, nor its impact on those attempting to farm organically elsewhere in the country where big ag has sunk its claws more tenaciously, or you’d have understood Marcella’s point about Leahy’s efforts to enable organic agriculture in the rest of the country  – and be deeply appreciative of those efforts.

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