Andy Martin: Birther king turned environmentalist?

Republican presidential candidate Andy Martin returns to New Hampshire on Friday, July 8, 2011. He plans to campaign against the Northern Pass project in Keene.

Martin, who once promised to nail NH GOP Chairman Jack Kimball’s scalp to the table (or wall), appears to have found a soft spot in his heart for the environment. He’s launched a new blog and TV ad opposing the Northern Pass, although keener eyes will notice the blog – StopNothernPass.blogspot.com – is full of thinly veiled requests for donations. 

The self-described “King of the Birthers” took fellow GOP presidential candidate Michele Bachmann to task after last month’s CNN debate, defending the EPA as the creation of a Republican president (Richard Nixon):

Then there is Bachmann’s war against the environment. Here Bachmann is completely unhinged. I do not doubt that EPA bureaucrats exceed their authority and their mandate from time to time. But the Republican Party has historically been the party of the environment. The EPA was created by a Republican president. Bachmann wants to wage war on the EPA.

Out in the boondocks where Bachmann grew up and lived, environmental problems may not have been as obvious when she was a child (although excessive pig and chicken production are a just a couple of the constant threats to the environment of Iowa today, Bachmann’s home state).

Let me speak directly to Michele: “Michele, I have lived in big cites. I remember when you would have dirty linens, full of soot, if you opened your windows in Chicago or New York. I remember when GE was dumping PCB’s in the Hudson River, and contaminated that great waterway. I remember when the air was not fit to breathe in many of our cities. No, cleaning up the environment is never easy. It has taken decades to undo the damage of decades. And, yes, occasionally the EPA oversteps.

But I am not willing to pander to your base, Michele, and tell them we should do away with the EPA and let big business start polluting all over again. No thank you. I support the EPA when it’s right, and as president would correct its abuses when the agency is wrong.”

In fact, the “abolish the EPA” mentality is a large part of what’s wrong with both political parties. Both Democratic and Republican candidates are funded by large law firms and lobbyists, big business and Wall Street crooks and polluters. That’s why the American people despise Washington and despise the Congress. Voters are not stupid.

My observations on the deficiencies in my opponents may irritate some Republicans. But my campaign is grounded in reality not fantasy. Americans want to remove Obama not because he is a Democrat but because he is a socialist and radical. (I was the first person to call Obama a “socialist” on national TV which is one of the reasons he despises me.) Ordinary Americans identify “conservatism” with conservative ideas, conserving what we have, not gambling on untested theories and self-defeating and simplistic solutions to solving the problems of a complex world.