Much was made of Cheney’s group’s membership and activities, including the extreme secrecy surrounding it. An uproar over the taskforce led Congress to investigate and even file a lawsuit to gain more information, although their efforts were unsuccessful. The Washington Post reported,

“One of the first visitors, on Feb. 14 [2001], was James J. Rouse, then vice president of Exxon Mobil and a major donor to the Bush inauguration; a week later, longtime Bush supporter Kenneth L. Lay, then head of Enron Corp., came by for the first of two meetings. On March 5, some of the country’s biggest electric utilities, including Duke Energy and Constellation Energy Group, had an audience with the task force staff.”

“Jack N. Gerard, then with the National Mining Association, had a meeting with Lundquist and other [Energy Task Force] staffers in February. He urged the administration to give the Energy Department responsibility for promoting technology for easing global warming and to keep the issue away from the Environmental Protection Agency, which could issue regulations on greenhouse gas emissions. The administration adopted that position.”

With a administration run by former energy magnates, and advised by and outsourced to corporate America, it is both unsurprising and no coincidence that now, the economy is the worst it has been since the Great Depression of the 1930s, our dependence of foreign energy is at an all-time high, and efforts to fight global warming are all but non-existent. And it is somewhat ironic that today, the same day vice-president Biden announces the creation of his middle-class task force, his predecessor’s beneficiary, ExxonMobil, announces a full-year profit of $45.2 billion, setting a new company and U.S. record.

It took less than eight years for Bush administration policies and ideologies to destroy this nation economically, politically, and morally. President Obama and vice-president Biden have taken appropriate steps on numerous fronts to right the ship of state. It’s time the Right, which is locked in a deep battle for its identity and ideology today, open its eyes and recognize its policies are wrong, and realize it has wrecked America, wounded its people, and begin to apologize.