We have roosting vultures everywhere, left, right and center, salivating over what many are perceiving as the carcass of the Obama administration. I hear my friends on the left excoriating Obama for failing to do enough to bring BP's catastrophe under control. I read about the anti-government goons--Bobby the Joker Jindal and Bulbous Bloviator Haley Barbour are among the most entertaining--complaining that the government isn't doing enough. Imagine if it didn't exist, as they would have, government could do nothing at all! Alas--then Republicans would have to rail about something real. Everyone else is just feeling whiplashed into shock that the BP "spill" is in fact the most extreme environmental cataclysm the US has ever experienced. And the devastation has just begun.
There is no person whose resolve would not be tested in the extreme by having to clean up the dungheap left behind by Bush-Cheney. It took a special kind of malevolence to make the kind of mess those reprobates left behind. They made America believe that science was suspect; that facts were fungible and being smart was politically incorrect, even un-American. They gave burrowed bureaucrats with anti-brain biases the license to fudge facts and revise scientific data to fit their political persuasions. As a result, many career scientists and professionals left the various Executive branches rather than have their integrity compromised by political pressure.
And, voila! Having decimated the very agencies that could had have the capacity to come to the rescue in the Gulf, the Republicans can now acclaim the reality of their mantra, "Government is the problem". With about 22,000 jobs to fill and Republicans putting silent holds on as many Obama appointees as they can get away with, the chances that Obama will have a fully functioning government any time soon, are slim to none. So we are left to rely on the corporate savvy that conservatives think is the answer to everything. Except it isn't. BP, we now know, is clueless. The oil spill response expertise its permit alleged, doesn't exist. Where are those pesky smartie pants when we need them?
BP's 600-page permit application, amendments to which were granted in a little as ten minutes, was shear fiction. A cut and paste folly that included the need to protect the walruses and other marine mammals that do not exist in the Gulf, it is a far cry from the ten year, 3,000-page application process that Cape Wind had to undergo. Is it any wonder we are so far behind in the development and implementation of renewable energy?
The Earth is bleeding to death. If this assault on its capacity to sustain us isn't enough to get us off our carbon addiction, we derve to go the way of the dodo bird.