This is a rush transcript from “Hannity,” June 21, 2010. This copy may not be in its final form and may be updated.
SEAN HANNITY, HOST: Rumors are flying that major personnel changes may be underway at the White House. Now according to London’s Daily Telegraph, Rahm “Rahmbo Dead Fish” Emanuel is on his way out the door of the West Wing. Now the newspaper reports that “Rahmbo” is Fed up with “The Anointed One”‘s idealism and will depart after the midterm elections in November.
Now Emanuel has denied this report and for now he’s staying put. And as always politics are trumping common sense at the White House. Now the latest incidence of that phenomenon is the panel that is appointed by the anointed one to investigate the Gulf oil spill.
Now according to the AP, only one member of the commission has a background in engineering in the unrelated field of optics and physics. And the others are merely Democratic partisans.
Let’s take a look: Frances Beinecke is an environmental activist who has written that America’s, quote, “addiction to oil is the primary cause of the Gulf spill.” Former Florida Senator Bob Graham led his state’s efforts to ban offshore drilling. Donald Boesch of the University of Maryland argued that drilling off the coast of Virginia should be halted. And Fran Ulmer is a member of the Aspen Institute’s Commission on Arctic Climate Change. And you know how big a threat that is.
Well, I don’t know how much help these individuals will provide in investigating the spill, but I’m sure they will serve up a lot of Democratic talking points.
Joining me now with analysis Fox News contributor, the one and only, Charles Krauthammer.
Charles, welcome back.
CHARLES KRAUTHAMMER, SYNDICATED COLUMNIST: Thank you very much, Sean. Pleasure to be here.
HANNITY: All right. First of all I’ve always been suspicious because Washington Post, New York times, all these articles really praising Rahm Emanuel at the expense of the White House.
So rumors of his departure don’t surprise me. And I always have the suspicion that why do I think that those rumors probably came from Rahm himself or somebody associated with him. Your thoughts?
KRAUTHAMMER: Well, I’m not sure. I mean there are so many back channels coming out of the White House. So many with private agendas and I’m always suspicious when I get one source, particularly a British source, telling me that.
I wouldn’t be surprised if Rahm left after the elections. And two years is probably enough. It’s a tough job. And he’s got other ambitions. He may not – you know, it’s difficult to be chief of staff and to make a career out of it. And he’s got ambitions, I think, for electoral politics for him to be elected himself.
So he may – and also, given his name, his background I think he could make a lot of money in the short period of time and perhaps he wants to do that as well.
HANNITY: What do you make of this commission? Because it seems to me that if you’re going to have a commission studying the Gulf oil spill, you’d probably want to put in there engineers, experts, people in the oil industry, people that know about drilling. Seems that we only got people here with a political agenda.
KRAUTHAMMER: Well, that’s what you do if you want a real commission to give you real results.
(LAUGHTER)
KRAUTHAMMER: When Reagan – when Reagan appointed the commission for the Challenger disaster, there were 13 members, seven of which were experts in aviation in space and three others were scientists. Among whom was a man who was said to be the greatest scientific mind since Einstein, Richard Feynman, the guy who demonstrated the flaw that actually caused the explosion right there in the hearings on national television. That was a real commission.
Look Sean, you know as well as I do, you give me the power to appoint a commission, I can guarantee the result in advance. You can write the report in advance. And from what I heard of your tally of the members of this commission, the majority already are committed environmentalists so we know what they’re going to recommend.
HANNITY: All right. So they’re going in with a predetermined conclusion here. They’re not going to really investigate because they don’t have the scientific background to investigate the real causes.
So they’re going to go in there with an agenda. Do you think the agenda is to stop all offshore drilling? What do you think of this?
KRAUTHAMMER: I’m not sure how specific it’ll be, but you know it’ll be hostile to oil, to fossil fuels, to any kind of increased exploration. One of them already has come out right now in the middle of the crisis against drilling in the Arctic which would be safer or drilling in other places offshore in shallower water, which would be safer as well.
So that’s a predetermined that can – look what happened when the secretary of the Interior appointed a real panel of experts to look into recommendations immediately and the Interior Department put out a report, under their – over their name, saying that we should six-month moratorium.
They were scandalized by that. They wrote a letter the Interior Department saying they never recommended that. These are real experts who said all you want is a pause. You don’t want six months actually. It will increase safety risk as well as untold economic damage.
So here we are with the politicization of science by the administration, putting in a recommendation into a report that the scientists never did and then claiming that it was a recommendation of the scientists.
The deputy in the Interior Department has already apologized as a result of that. So you can see how objective they are with commissions.
HANNITY: Look, I’ve said from almost the very beginning, nothing surprises me inasmuch as, Charles, the president clings to his rigid ideology. What I am surprised about is I do think they ran a pretty effective and strong political campaign, and just for purely political purposes, I would think that the administration or the people around him that helped get him elected would see politically that this has now become a massive liability for them. But that’s not the case. Why do you think that is?
KRAUTHAMMER: Look, I think they are appointing a commission so that they get people who look like experts. No one is going to go into details. Giving recommendations which they would make otherwise. And thus has a patina of being objective and scientific. That’s what’s going on here and that’s how they want to get recommendations that are predetermined in advance.
HANNITY: All right, Charles Krauthammer, love your columns, love your writing and love watching you on “Fox Report” and “Special Report.” Thanks for being with us.
KRAUTHAMMER: Pleasure. Great. Thank you very much.
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