Hurricane Barry

In my last post I wrote about the possibility that environmental extremists might have martyred a portion of their own planet through the Gulf oil spill in order to make a case against offshore drilling. I even offered the theory that various agents of the current majority political party might have had a hand in it.

This may (or may not) sound like wild conspiracy, depending on how closely you’ve been following the tactics of the Obama administration. After all, who would want to believe a close friend of the president would want to do something as drastic as blowing something up? (Never mind Bill Ayers …).

And who would want to believe that politicians would want to risk damage to the economy simply for their own political gain and further control over regulations? Again, we could ask people like Chris Dodd and Barney Frank who spent years engineering a financial meltdown only so they could be put right back in charge of handling the issue.

But whether or not there was foul play in the explosion that led to the oil spill, it now seems apparent we can rule out the involvement of the administration. Primarily because, in the weeks following the disaster, the administration has shown a level of incompetence and disinterest unlike anything since the days of Jimmy Carter. If they did have any hand in it, one would assume they would have known how to handle the aftermath without looking like complete buffoons.

With the miserable failure of the administration, it seems Obama has further lost the support of those people who were duped into voting for him, including many committed leftists.

Most notably Louisiana native James Carville has turned his attentions from ranting against the forces of decency to ranting about the bungling of the Obama administration. As a Democrat, you know you’re in trouble when someone like Carville, one of the world’s leading experts on alternate realities, isn’t buying your rhetoric.

So far, Obama’s had two ideas for dealing with the crisis …

The first was suggesting that someone “just plug the hole”. Surely no one else had thought of that … or … well, maybe they had.

But, as Barry’s never had to solve an actual problem before, he has no real-world reference for determining how difficult it is to plug a hole in a pipe gushing oil with enormous pressure 5,000 feet under the Gulf of Mexico.

So he came up with Brilliant Plan Number Two: blame George Bush.

Surely it was Bush’s fault the Obama administration gave this particular oil rig a safety award just days before the incident.

Surely Bush was responsible for the Obama administration’s lack of response to the crisis. (At this point, it would actually be a disappointment if something bad happened and the Democrats forgot to blame it on Bush.)

This spill struck fifteen months into Obama’s presidency. By contrast, Bush was less than eight months into his presidency when he was faced with the worst act of terrorism ever on American soil.

It would have been easy for Bush to blame the Clinton administration for 9/11. After all, Bill Clinton spent most of the time he was in office dismantling the intelligence network which might have prevented the attack. (Well, actually he spent most of his presidency sleeping around and covering up his affairs, but dismantling our intelligence agencies rated a close third.)

All the same, it never seemed to occur to Bush to waste time pointing his finger at someone else. He pulled on his cowboy boots, took on the problem directly, and did it a lot faster than Obama could think to “just plug the hole.”

While oil was flowing into the gulf, Obama spent five weeks vacationing, playing golf, apologizing abroad for the greatness of his country, preventing Arizona from defending U.S. borders, campaigning for his fellow Democrats, and generally doing anything else he could to avoid addressing the oil spill.

When he finally deigned to give a press conference on the issue, he claimed it had been his highest priority (after working on his backswing, of course).

One has to wonder if Obama, who famously and repeatedly called military corpsmen “corpse men,” didn’t accidentally mistake “gulf” for golf.

Some of this criticism of the Obama administration’s lack of action might seem a bit harsh if not for Obama’s statements preceding his presidency.

Of the roughly thirty minutes Obama spent as a U.S. senator preceding his ascent to the White House, at least twenty of those minutes were used to publicly bash the Bush administration’s handling of the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina.

Obama’s campaign, like most political campaigns, was spent telling people “I can do the job better than the last guy.” Or, as disillusioned pundits ranging from Kirsten Powers to Peggy Noonan have noted lately, if there was one thing Obama really tried to sell us on, it was his competence.

The problem is that, when faced with his first actual Katrina-style test, he failed miserably.

While there is a lot of disagreement over how efficiently the Bush administration responded to Katrina, when it comes to Obama’s response under similar circumstances, both Democrats and Republicans seem to agree these guys are the Keystone Cops.

The only real “contribution” Obama’s made to the situation is to get in the way of people like Louisiana governor Bobby Jindal, whose plan to limit damage to the coastline was thwarted by the administration. (Ironically, the cause of the perceived delay in Bush’s response to Katrina was that he did not want the federal government to overstep its bounds and disrupt the efforts of local Democrat politicians.)

And while Republicans have tried to implement real solutions to the problem, the administration has been running EPA tests to determine the ecological impact of those solutions … tests that would not be completed until the chance to act was long past. Apparently spending time running computer models trying to save the environment is just as much a waste of time as it is when people like Al Gore spew forth fraudulent data on climate change.

So, in a less than fortunate comical twist, when there is an actual situation mankind has the ability to impact, Democrats (who’ve spent decades telling people that Republicans want to destroy the environment) are now standing in the way of Republican efforts to save the planet!

So what we’re getting from Barry isn’t a competent solution to the problem. It’s just the same old spin-meister in full campaign mode, claiming credit for what looked like a workable solution to the problem, blaming the Bush administration for his own shortcomings, and blaming big oil for everything else.

Speaking of BIG OIL, Obama’s predictably using an isolated incident to outlaw further American efforts to drill domestically. We can now look forward to even higher gas prices and greater dependence on foreign oil because Democrats think it’s too risky to drill in our own territories.

The irony is that, despite this significant but one-time spill, American rigs are much cleaner and safer than those of other countries like Cuba and Venezuela who plan to continue drilling for oil in the same area we’ve been using.

In fact, if we had just drilled on solid uninhabited ground in Alaska (as Sarah Palin recommended) even the worst of potential accidents could have been cleaned up within a matter of hours. Why is it okay for us to harness oil from our less environmentally aware neighbors, but not okay for us to monitor the safe procurement of our own energy?

The lesson Obama wants us to learn from all of this is that we cannot trust oil companies to provide us with safe and efficient energies.

The real lesson we should take away from this is very different. When a real problem comes along, we cannot rely on the Obama administration to do anything more than find a scapegoat.

If all we want is someone to point the finger of blame, we should keep electing Democrats. If we want real solutions, it’s time to bring back the Republicans.

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