George W. Bush's personal demonstration of his visionary economic leadership last month to those of us in the Pacific Northwest was pretty simple. If people can afford to invest over a thousand dollars a plate for a bad lunch, the economy must be in great shape, right?

A similar sort of "let them eat factory-farmed salmon" attitude permeated Dubya's "other" reason for being in the Northwest, the "official" presidential duty that will enable his campaign to bill taxpayers for part of the cost of his purely mercenary swing through to cash in from rich Republican techies and timber barons: his environmental photo-ops, coming soon to a pretty TV campaign ad near you.

If Bush is kissing a salmon, they can't be endangered, right?

If I were that fish, I'd be very afraid. Bush proclaiming his love for the great outdoors is like Ted Bundy proclaiming his great admiration for pretty young women. He's leaving out a few critical details.

And so it was--coincidence? Hardly!--that Bush's own EPA quietly slipped some stunning news into the world late Friday afternoon, in the quietest part of the weekly news cycle, while the presidential press corps was 3,000 miles away listening to Dubya talk about how great his environmental record is.

It's a trick the White House uses, successfully, almost every week. On that week, the EPA's Inspector General released a report detailing for the first time how political operatives in the White House and National Security Council spiked EPA expert warnings to residents of New York City in the days and weeks after 9-11 as to the air quality downwind of the smoldering World Trade Center.

The toxic stew of burning skyscraper was bad for human lungs, and even at the time everyone knew it but the Bush Administration. But what the IG report did for the first time was release the drafts of EPA public advisories, side by side with the final versions. Warnings to asthma victims, the elderly, kids, and other vulnerable populations were deleted; calls for persons needing to clean asbestos-laden ash from indoor areas to use experts trained in hazardous material removal were changed to instructions to follow the guidelines given by local (Republican) elected officials. At every turn, purportedly for national security reasons, public safety was sacrificed to minimize the notion that breathing toxic heavy metals might be bad for you.

Not that Bush's friends in the oil and energy industries would stand to benefit from such a bias. Not at all. Why, the additional news--also broken the day Bush was in Washington state--that his administration would exempt most old coal plants from having to install pollution control devices was purely coincidental, both in its timing and its relationship to the post-9-11 instructions.

This is the sort of politically useful "junk science" Bush and his appointees have been inflicting on the country (and, via their contempt for global warming solutions and other international problems, the world) for going on three years. Resolution of the long-simmering coal plant controversy was seem as being a useful clearing of the decks for Bush's atrocious new nominee to head the EPA, Utah Gov. Michael Leavitt.

To get an idea of just how wretched a job Leavitt would do if confirmed, forget about his hostility toward wilderness protection for the stunningly beautiful canyonlands of southern Utah. Go to Salt Lake City.

I did, in May. And driving into the Salt Lake Valley from the south, on I-15, what I saw made me sick to my stomach.

Rounding the curve at the head of the pass separating the Salt Lake Valley from towns to the south, the scene before me was reminiscent of those anti-smoking commercials that show what cigarette use does to your lungs. With the Wasatch Mountains to the east and both mountains and the Great Salt Lake to the west, the Salt Lake Valley was once one of the most spectacular urban settings in the country. But on this day, it would be clear that I'd be descending into, and breathing, s sea of yellow-brown glop, the sort of toxic stew that once plagued residents of Denver and Los Angeles. The once-beautiful valley had become an urban wasteland. Just like, oh, Houston. Or Dallas.

For a number of reasons, I shouldn't have been surprised. The same factors that long made Denver's air so bad are even more present in Salt Lake County: a booming, car-dependent metropolis, a dry climate, a valley prone to air inversions, and high altitude. The Salt Lake area has far more pollution than 25 years ago because it has a lot more people and many more freeways and cars.

And because, for over a decade, Utah has had one of the most pro-business, anti-regulatory governors in the country. Who is now poised to become the person in charge of enforcing the entire country's environmental laws.

Scuttlebutt in DC is that the President's Men--the same hard-line insiders who've made America's attitude toward global warming an international scandal--hated and distrusted the previous EPA head, former New Jersey Gov. Christine Todd Whitman. They wanted "one of their own," a Westerner like Bush and Cheney and Interior Secretary Gail Norton, someone raised on the notion of endless land available for plunder, someone who'd share their antipathy not only to new legislation but to enforcing the environmental laws already on the books. Repeatedly, during Whitman's tenure, the White House hung her out to dry by undercutting or overriding her policies or public pronouncements. And this while Whitman herself compiled a record most environmentalists considered awful.

Groups like Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility (www.peer.org), the invaluable group of federal and state employees at agencies like EPA and Interior charged with our country's environmental stewardship, have for the past 30 months been revealing horror story after horror story of environmental law being compromised by Bush appointees eager to please their former colleagues in one or another environmentally damaging industry.

Leavitt promises to take such open contempt for the law and the nation's will to a new level. He's notorious among Utah enviros for not even inviting environmental experts or advocates to be involved in state/industry negotiations over environmental policy. Leavitt refused to lift a finger in cases like US Magnesium, whose dioxin-spewing mining facility on the western shore of the Great Salt Lake was for years considered the country's worst polluter.

After three years of policy-inflicted damage to the environment that will take decades to undo--in the cases where it can ever be undone at all -- will environmental groups now be able to muster public outrage over Leavitt's nomination? Will Senate Democrats finally begin speaking out for the majority of Americans on environmental issues, and fighting against Bush's despoiling of our planet like they mean it?

The scattered, anemic protests of Bush's Seattle stop included virtually no presence by local environmental groups. They should have been front and center challenging the lunacy of the notion that this is a president who sees nature as anything other than something he can hand over for his industry pals to plunder--provided, of course, they come to his fundraising lunches and dinners.

It's enough to make you throw up. Just like the view of Salt Lake City.