...and in other news this morning, President Obama has announced that the Federal Department of Transportation plans to close the entire Interstate Highway System as a result of the horrendous crash Saturday that claimed the lives of a local family. A top advisor to President Obama said Sunday that no new traffic will be permitted on any of the nations' Interstate Highways until the cause of the crash has been determined.
David Axelrod, appearing on ABC's Press the Meat, said this on Sunday, "No traffic will be allowed until we find out what caused this crash. The safety of the American public is our most important concern right now." When asked when traffic could resume, Axelrod said," We have teams on the ground as we speak trying to determine the cause. As soon as we have something, you'll know."
What?
This is merely the logical conclusion of the Obama administration's recent decision to halt new offshore oil drilling after announcing support for it a few weeks ago. The skeptic in this blog thinks this is highly suspicious. After all, if you wanted to throw conservatives a bone ( a bone that three quarters of the country wants) and announce that you're in favor of expanding the nations' energy independence, but your radical, left-wing environmental base starts screaming "No! Oil's all icky and stuff." and you want to keep their campaign money flowing into your coffer, this couldn't come at a better time. You could say "Oopsy daisy" and backtrack with impunity, with this disaster as the justification.
You could even make sure your sycophants in the media print articles by people who have no knowledge of the industry blasting the evil oil companies and greed and capitalism and anything else in an effort to justify your decison. Better yet, show the country that you're deadly serious about fixing this problem by dispatching teams of lawyers to monitor the spill. After all, nothing stops an oil leak like a strongly worded letter.
But I digress.
Out here, in the real world, we still have an ecological crisis that must be dealt with. The Obama administration wants to look like it's in control in order to avoid comparisons to President Bush and his response to Hurricane Katrina in 2005. After a Sunday in which various administration officials claimed they began to respond on "day one" ad nauseum, facts are surfacing that seem to indicate that this administration didn't take this emergency seriously until it was far too late.
It seems strange in light of all the debate about the negative effects of an oil spill that the federal government wouldn't have emergency teams at the ready to minimize the damage. And we're not talking about teams of lawyers, but rapid response teams that could start to attack the spill while still far away from shore.
If only we had something like that in place...
Hmmm.
Well, surprise, surprise. It seems that we do have something like that. In fact, we've had something like that in place since 1994. It was created in response to the Exxon Valdez spill. It involves ships that deploy booms to contain the oil that can then be burned far out at sea. This sounds like a good idea. Contain a potenially disastrous spill before it reaches shore. Avert a disaster. Brilliant!
All we need is boats and booms. What? We don't have any booms? None? Anywhere? You mean after all these years of talking about the devastation an offshore oil spill would cause and spending untold millions of tax dollars to install a plan to tackle a spill before it could do too much damage, we didn't use it?
Is this Obama's Katrina? You bet your light, sweet ass it is.
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