From Mean Read, North Dakota Media and Politics News. Posted By: The Editor December 9, 2016
It’s become apparent to everyone that North Dakota Gov. Jack Dalrymple’s leadership was nonexistent during the Dakota Access pipeline fiasco.
Even the conservative commentator Chris Berg of Valley News Live couldn’t help but ridicule the governor’s inability to reach a negotiation with pipeline protesters.
The Fargo Forum revealed that Jack has sent and received a total of zero (0) emails regarding the pipeline protest, despite it being the most significant issue in the state over the past few months. How is that possible?
Under his watch, the state has become a symbol of bullying to audiences worldwide for the ham-handed law enforcement response to the pipeline protests. And at the end of it all, the federal government decided to deny a necessary easement where the pipeline hoped to cross Lake Oahe.
In short, Dalrymple failed on every imaginable front.
Yesterday the lame-duck governor, who resembles less a duck and more a naked mole rat, met with the Forum Editorial Board to make a big announcement: It’s social media’s fault.
“There’s a new paradigm,” he said, referring to social media. “I try to do what I can, but I’m not match for that organization.”
So the governor, with all the authority of the state behind him, says he’s powerless in the face of Facebook shares. Very weak.
Obviously grasping for straws, Dalrymple also blamed the Dakota Access pipeline company for “abdicating” its role to publicly defend the project.
“It’s as safe a pipe as you can build,” Dalrymple pointed out, oblivious that pipelines have been leaking all over the state, including one just this week.
Lt. Gov. Drew Wrigley, also in attendance at the editorial board meeting, came up with a unique scapegoat of his own: Native Americans!
“The Native Americans are being used, absolutely being used, by these outside agitators,” he said.
Speaking of “being used,” Dalrymple has received hundreds of thousands of dollars in campaign contributions from the oil industry.
December 9, 2016, John Hanno, www.tarbabys.com
North Dakota is the poster child for the past; fossil fuel extraction at whatever cost to the environment. The future Trump Administration and the Republi-con controlled Congress should take notice. If they insist on rolling back progress made by the Obama Administration on climate change and the transition from dirty and toxic fossil fuel to sustainable energy, they will garner the same determined opposition. Native Americans, environmentalists, American Veterans and other protectors are the future, and they are becoming expert at exploiting social media. The evildoers like Gov. Dalrymple, as he stated himself, are no match for this new social media juggernaut because they are on the wrong side of the issue. The earth destroyers have on their side, fossil fuel interests, the uber banks, multi-millionaire and billionaire investors, and the red state political panderers, but the Earth Protectors have their God, their prayers and everyone else, with a modicum of common sense, standing with them. It’s really no contest.
The Dakota Access bank funding map is shown at, http://www.commondreams.org/views/2016/09/07/whos-banking-dakota-access-pipeline