5.23.2010

Obama needs to get off his skinny ass…

…and fix the mess in the Gulf of Mexico, as Rayne writing for FireDogLake suggest:

It's been more than 30 days since the Deepwater Horizon rig exploded and the well nearly a mile below on the sea floor began to erupt oil and methane, killing 11 of our fellow citizens and injuring even more both immediately and in the continuing damage which followed.

And nothing has happened of any consequence since then.

Oh, we've had a Category 5 hurricane of hot air, some decent questions from Congressional hearings, but zippo-zilch-nada in the way of an effective solution. (I pity the people of the Gulf who had to deal with another hurricane they couldn't escape.)

We had a big metal box set over the leak, not to stop it but to try to capture the oil. Anybody with the wherewithal to Google could predict this was going to fail because of the hydrates. They crystallize on contact with a solid surface in deepwaters below the average depth of the Continental Shelf.

And then we've had a tiny little pipsqueak of a hose nosed into the well pipe, which might as well have been a toothpick stuck in our mouths.

Now the White House is having a hissy behind closed doors with the media because dammitall, they can't stop asking questions about the spill. Oh that'll work, that'll make a difference; the biggest environmental disaster our country has experienced will go away if only the media shuts up about it.

Screw that. This has been nothing but a corporate-induced environmental and socio-biological experiment perpetuated on our commons without our consent, and the American public doesn't take well to experimentation without debate in advance. Witness our slow-moving policy on stem cell research, for example. We don't frigging like it.

She follows this invective by enumerating the steps the Obama Administration should if it intended to address this crisis with the seriousness it demands. Her article is must reading for those concerned about the environmental disaster in the Gulf of Mexico and the political disaster in Washington.

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