I Have Got To Get A New Dictionary
I keep looking up the word muzzled or stifled or silenced and I never, ever seem to get this definition anywhere I look. A NASA scientist claims he was muzzled because he was only allowed to give 1,400 interviews. on company time, in the past few years.
1,400. In a few years time. Let's take that as the past three years. that's like 467 per year or more than one a day. Each and every day for three years. He doesn't even take weekends off, it seems. Silenced? Heck, you can't get a word in edgewise.
James Hansen, director of NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies, who argues global warming could be catastrophic, said NASA staffers denied his request to do a National Public Radio interview because they didn't want his message to get out.
But Republicans told him the hundreds of other interviews he did belie his broad claim he was being silenced. "We have over 1,400 opportunities that you've availed yourself to, and yet you call it, you know, being stifled," said Rep. Darrell Issa, California Republican.
Mr. Hansen responded: "For the sake of the taxpayers, they should be availed of my expertise. I shouldn't be required to parrot some company line."
I think we've been availed of Mr. Hansen's enormous ego at this point. And his mutilation of the meaning of words, including 'availed'. (I don't link the Washington Times very often at all, but this one was so patently absurd, I just had to.) If anyone can be heard over the loudly clamoring "silence" of Mr. Hansen, please let us know here in the Crabitat. We'd like pictures.
