Montanans "Baffled" By Zinke's Willingness To Abandon Pretty Much He Ever Said Pre-Shitstain
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The National Rifle Association loves Zinke. Chris Cox, the executive director of the group’s Institute for Legislative Action, has said that Zinke’s nomination marked “the end of a hostile era towards hunters and sportsmen.” But it wasn’t always so. As a state senator, freshly retired from the Navy, Zinke said that .50-caliber rifles were too dangerous for ordinary citizens to own. “He felt very strongly about that then,” Gary Marbut, president of the Montana Shooting Sports Association, wrote on his blog. “Then, about the time he announced his candidacy for the U.S. House, he sent me a card saying he’d changed his position on .50-caliber rifles. Yes, a sudden election season conversion.”
Zinke’s moderate-by-Montana-standards position on guns and a handful of other issues, including climate change, annoyed the right wing of the state’s Republican Party. That Zinke was a fifth-generation native son, had been a starter on the University of Oregon’s football team, and had served two tours in Iraq with the SEALs somehow made things worse: here was a Republican who didn’t need to swagger around Helena behind the wheel of a lifted dualie. Zinke drove a Toyota Prius, which, outside liberal havens like Bozeman, Missoula, and Helena, is the vehicular way of saying “I’m from California, I’m a communist, and I love wolves.” It was this Ryan Zinke who won a seat in the Montana state senate in 2008 and was later elected twice by wide margins to fill Montana’s at-large seat in Congress. And it’s the memory of a more moderate Zinke that has many Montanans, along with conservationists across the West, feeling baffled.
Right out of the gate, Zinke signaled not only that he would support the Trump administration’s plan to expand the oil and gas industry’s access to federal public lands, but that he would lead from the front—even when that meant attacking the Antiquities Act, the formidable land-preservation law signed in 1906 by Zinke’s hero, Theodore Roosevelt. At the helm of Interior, Zinke has also been a magnet for controversy in ways that have distracted from his goals as secretary.
A month into his new role, he took a taxpayer-funded trip to the Virgin Islands, where he attended a GOP fundraiser and posed with attendees for $5,000 a photo. He’s made at least a half-dozen such forays, drawing scrutiny for his tendency to mix partisan activities with official duties. In June, the day before he was to appear at the Western Governors’ Association conference in Whitefish, he paid $12,375 to charter a flight from Las Vegas to Montana after giving a talk to a hockey team owned by a donor to his congressional campaigns. The trip triggered an investigation into his travel expenditures, conducted by the Department of the Interior’s inspector general, which is ongoing. In November, the inspector general announced that the investigation had been hindered by deficient record keeping on the part of Zinke’s office.
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https://www.outsideonline.com/2266216/man-flies-his-own-flag
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