Columnist Jeff German: Bush plays us for state full of fools

Friday, June 25, 2004 | 10:56 a.m.

Now that President Bush's whirlwind week of campaigning in Nevada has passed, there's time to think about how insulted we should feel.

We're being played for fools by the president of the United States.

Bush stumped in Reno last Friday and never once talked about Yucca Mountain or explained to reporters why he lied to Nevadans four years ago about his intentions to put the high-level nuclear waste dump in our back yard.

Vice President Dick Cheney was in Las Vegas on Monday and also never gave reporters a chance to question him about Yucca Mountain, which is 90 miles northwest of the city.

But someone within the campaign must have been feeling guilty about snubbing the state's reporters because, once Cheney was safely back in Washington, he decided to do an interview by satellite with KLAS Channel 8 anchor Gary Waddell.

Waddell is one of my favorite news anchors, but he blew this assignment.

Even though it was in a controlled environment, this was the first chance a Nevada reporter had to question Bush or Cheney on this subject since the president two years ago approved Yucca Mountain.

But it ended up doing nothing more than give the Bush campaign additional free exposure here -- at a time when the race against Democratic challenger John Kerry is said to be dead even.

Where's Jon Ralston when you need him?

Tracey Schmitt, a Bush-Cheney spokeswoman, said the six-minute interview, which Channel 8 billed as an "exclusive," was one of a handful Cheney gave television stations around the country from the comfort of the Bush-Cheney campaign headquarters in the Washington area.

Waddell wasted valuable time asking Cheney about the economy, getting the same boring speech the vice president made here on Monday.

When Waddell finally got to Yucca Mountain, after setting up the question with talk that politics may have played a role in Bush's decision two years ago, the television anchor asked, "Do you think Yucca Mountain is a good idea? Should it go forward?"

If the vice president had said "no," as Kerry did during a campaign visit to Las Vegas last month, Channel 8 indeed would have had an exclusive. But, no small surprise, the vice president didn't say no.

Cheney again gave the standard ambiguous response that it was "the right decision" made for the greater good of the country (and the nuclear industry that's so close to Cheney.) He insisted the decision, as the president promised Nevadans four years ago, was based on sound science, but he offered no facts to support that contention.

And Waddell didn't bother to press the vice president on that subject.

If only Waddell had asked Cheney about concerns raised earlier this year by physicist Paul Craig, a former member of the Nuclear Waste Technical Review Board, the watchdog over the government's plans for disposing of nuclear waste.

Craig, who left the board so that he could speak freely about the dangers of Yucca Mountain, said the multibillion-dollar project so far has been based on "bad science," not sound science.

The project is so poorly designed, he charged, it could end up leaking radioactive waste and pose monumental health risks for all of us.

This is why news organizations here have to stop letting themselves be used by the Bush-Cheney campaign, and it is why we have to stop letting the president of the United States play us for fools.

Until he puts a halt to Yucca Mountain, President Bush doesn't deserve our vote in November.