Stinky Zinke Forced Out
Saying Goodbye to Bad Rubbish, But He’s Not the Problem
It’s been too much fun hating on Ryan Zinke, Donald Trump’s recently forced-out Secretary of the Interior and a peripatetic Mesa rat. Zinke stepped down amid an eruption of alleged ethical scandals, which, real or imagined, would have been excruciatingly explored by the new Democratic majority. Cocky, swaggering, and insufferably self-enraptured, Zinke went out swinging. When Raúl Grijalva — the ranking Democrat on the Natural Resources Committee — recently called for Zinke’s resignation, Zinke tweeted back it must be hard for Grijalva “to think straight from the bottom of a bottle.” Grijalva, for the record, was hit by the incoming tweet while parked on a barstool at his favorite D.C. watering hole, the Tune Inn.
Whether it’s optics or ethics, Zinke’s have been uniformly awful. He famously rode his horse to work on Day One. Tellingly, his cowboy hat was screwed on backward. Zinke had a special flag installed at the Department of Interior; when he was on premises, the flag was hoisted; when he left, it came down. Zinke, undeniably, was charming, charismatic, and cutthroat. The question remains whether he is also corrupt.
Yes, he and his wife partnered with the CEO of Halliburton — the largest oil-supply company in the world — in a sweetheart real-estate development project slated for his hometown of Whitefish, Montana. Turns out, Zinke was going to get a new microbrewery out of the arrangement in exchange for “donating” a few parking spaces from a nonprofit he started on behalf of veterans. As a conflict of interest, it couldn’t be more obvious. The person in charge of all onshore and offshore oil and gas drilling on public lands — Zinke — should never be entwined with a major petro-potentate.
