Obama's Oil Spill Speech - All We Expected and Less!

On Tuesday night, President Obama gave his first speech from the Oval Office. From behind the desk made from the British ship Resolute, he attempted to quell the public uproar over his bungling of the Deepwater Horizon oil spill currently emptying into the Gulf of Mexico and onto its' shoreline. The full transcript is here.

He began by reassuring the American public that he had been Johnny-on-the-spot since day one, appointing  Nobel Prize-winning physicist and Energy Secretary Stephen Chu to head a panel that consisted mainly of people with other high sounding titles but no actual experience in petroleum engineering. He promised that the spill would be 90% contained sometime in the coming days. Or weeks. Whenever.

He then laid out the clean-up plans, citing Admiral Allen as the point man and bragging that he's authorized some 17,000 National Guardsmen to the coast.

As the clean up continues, we will offer whatever additional resources and assistance our coastal states may need. Now, a mobilization of this speed and magnitude will never be perfect, and new challenges will always arise. I saw and heard evidence of that during this trip. So if something isn’t working, we want to hear about it. If there are problems in the operation, we will fix them.

Hmm, let's ask Louisiana governor Bobby Jindal if those problems have been fixed.

He then proceeds to the next part of the speech, which also just happens to be his favorite sport, right after golf- blaming George Bush.

The oil spill represents just the latest blow to a place that has already suffered multiple economic disasters and decades of environmental degradation that has led to disappearing wetlands and habitats.

Really? Could you please be a tad more specific, Mr. President? Where are these disappearing wetlands and habitats and what, precisely caused their disappearance? Why are we just now hearing about this?

The third part of our response plan is the steps we’re taking to ensure that a disaster like this does not happen again.

With a job-killing moratorium on drilling in the middle of the worst recession in American history. Well, that'll certainly do it, Sir.

I know this creates difficulty for the people who work on these rigs, but for the sake of their safety, and for the sake of the entire region, we need to know the facts before we allow deepwater drilling to continue.

Your concern will most certainly pay the rent and utilities for those affected, won't it? We should be glad this wasn't a plane crash. If it were, you'd probably impose a moratorium on all flights until we found the cause.

It's along about here that this speech degrades into radical, leftist, environmental talking points that serve no purpose other than to lay the groundwork for the passage of the job-killing Cap-and-Tax bill.

After all, oil is a finite resource. We consume more than 20% of the world’s oil, but have less than 2% of the world’s oil reserves. And that’s part of the reason oil companies are drilling a mile beneath the surface of the ocean – because we’re running out of places to drill on land and in shallow water.

Really, Mr. President? Then why are we finding vast reserves of oil in places where we know dinosaurs never roamed, like miles beneath the Gulf of Mexico? And the only reason we're running out of places to drill is that your radical progressive cohorts in Congress and the EPA have imposed so many restrictions on easily accessed oil that companies are forced to drill in increasingly inaccessible areas, a direct cause of this spill and it's subsequent damage.

For decades, we have known the days of cheap and easily accessible oil were numbered. For decades, we have talked and talked about the need to end America’s century-long addiction to fossil fuels. And for decades, we have failed to act with the sense of urgency that this challenge requires. Time and again, the path forward has been blocked – not only by oil industry lobbyists, but also by a lack of political courage and candor.

Mr. President, we are not "addicted to oil". If you were just a bit better informed and experienced, particularly when it comes to science and physics, you'd know that there isn't a better or more versatile substance on Earth. Nothing else comes close to it. The development of oil into plastics has been just one of the most beneficial industrial movements in history. So many things have been made from petroleum products that they are beyond the space of this blog to even begin to catalog. So your (and your radical environmentalist supporters) claim of being "addicted to oil" is just so much hogwash. And you know it.

When I was a candidate for this office, I laid out a set of principles that would move our country towards energy independence.

Would that be the principles that would make our utility bills "necessarily skyrocket" and bankrupt coal companies, putting scores of Americans out of work and decimating our standard of living? Those principles, Mr. President?

His closing point is a real doozy. Basically, he states that if we can put a man on the moon, then we can certainly begin to use alternative forms of  energy. Again, his single-minded focus on organizing communities works against him out here in the real world. It's as if we, the United States of American, are so stupid that we can't or won't find alternatives to oil.

Mr. President, if it were out there, we'd find it.

And thank you for your vote of confidence.