August 21, 2007 3:37 PM

Register-Guard: GOP Sen. Smith "Willing to Bend and Selectively Omit the Facts"

Oregon Republican Sen. Gordon Smith (R) has a problem, and he's making it worse. His problem is that just 38 percent of Oregonians tell pollsters they are ready to support him for reelection - an incredibly anemic number for an incumbent. Now, one of his state's largest papers is hammering him for deliberately lying about a major environmental issue.

Blue Oregon notes that the Washington Post recently reported that Vice President Dick Cheney intervened to divert water from the Klamath River to agricultural irrigation - a decision that, according to the Eugene Register-Guard, "many believe led to the deaths five years ago of 75,000 fish in the Klamath Basin." Sen. Smith, like the reliable Bush administration stooge that he is, has nonetheless defended the decision - and the Register-Guard is calling him out on his dishonest attempts to claim that the illness that caused the fish kill had nothing to do with the White House's original intervention and water diversion decision.

Here's the excerpt from the paper's editorial:

"The problem with Sen. Gordon Smith's defense of the Bush administration's 2002 decision to divert Klamath Lake water for irrigation isn't that the Oregon Republican is wobbly on the facts. It's that he's willing to bend and selectively omit the facts to justify ideologically driven political positions...In a Saturday story by The Register-Guard's David Steves, commercial fishing advocate Glenn Spain aptly observed that Smith's simplistic attribution of the dead fish to gill disease 'is sort of like saying lung cancer kills smokers, not smoking.'...Smith has shown a willingness to overlook inconvenient facts before...With Smith facing what could be a tough re-election race next year, he should pay more attention to the facts when discussing environmental issues, including Klamath Basin water policy."

Eugene may be a liberal town, but it is in the center of a swath of Oregon considered pretty evenly split between the parties. Smith getting so totally raked over the coals in that region for trying to mislead his own constituents isn't going to help his already decreasing chances for reelection.