Where I Stand — Brian Greenspun: Reid unfairly blamed

Tuesday, March 5, 2002 | 8:15 a.m.

YOU GOTTA LOVE those folks at the little paper down the street. Love them but not trust them one little bit.

Nevada will soon be in the fight of its life, perhaps even for it, when the United States Senate argues over sustaining Gov. Kenny Guinn's veto of the high-level nuclear waste dump. At the forefront of that effort will be our senior U.S. senator, Harry Reid, the man who just three years ago, with the able help of then-Sen. Dick Bryan, body slammed the nuclear power industry and its GOP supporters who were trying to send the radioactive garbage our way some ten years earlier than originally planned. When President Bill Clinton vetoed that effort, Harry managed to find the 34 votes necessary to sustain that veto and keep the power boys at bay.

Well, life has changed and now we are faced with a president, George W. Bush, who has flat-out lied to the people of this state, and we could be paying for that deception for generations to come.

I realize that all of Nevada's mothers and fathers are in this fight together, regardless of political affiliation or liberal or conservative leanings, and that it does no good to try to divide us along such lines when we all need to stand together.

I also know, though, that it was not President Clinton nor even candidate Al Gore who made the decision to stick that nuke garbage so far up our mountain that we may never recover from it. It was George W. Bush doing the bidding of his energy industry buddies and his Republican colleagues in the Congress. There is no other way to sugarcoat that betrayal.

But, as we move forward in this fight -- a fight I know that has people from all sides questioning the real impact of a Yucca Mountain reality -- it is imperative that we lock arms against the bad guys, the evil ones, who would set upon Nevada families a potential of dozens of lifetimes of health and safety concerns that need not occur.

We are, in the end, being put upon by our government because of money. It is cheaper to bury that poison outside of Las Vegas than to reprocess it like France does or store it where it is made until science finds a real solution. And that, for me, is the most disturbing part of this whole nightmare.

President Bush made a money decision with our lives and our futures. And that is just plain wrong.

So enters the Review-Journal, which tries to make political hay out of this very bad situation. In a contorted bit of illogical logic, the folks down the street have tried to leave Harry Reid holding the nuclear waste bag.

Rather than admit how wrong they were in shoving George Bush down Nevada's throats in the last election as if he were the Second Coming, they have tried to equate his actions with the words of his opponent in the last election.

The election, clearly, is over but there should be no doubt in any person's mind that Al Gore would have sought a scientific solution to nuclear waste and not the politically easy one that President Bush has employed. Simply put, with George we get nuke waste. With Al, we would have gotten science.

But, rather than admit how wrong that editorial board was in its assessment of Bush's promise to Nevadans, the R-J has chosen to lay the blame at Harry's feet. That is not only wrong but also unfair and so, so like the Review-Journal.

If we win this fight in the Senate it will be because of many people, Republicans and Democrats who have stepped up for this fight. But it will be mostly because Harry Reid is the assistant majority leader of the United States Senate.

If we lose -- which means there aren't enough Republicans true to their principles to help us win our fight -- it will be because of just one man -- President Bush -- who told us one thing and did just the opposite.

Don't ever get confused about that!