Editorial - 28 May 2010
Obama's Environmental Disaster
T
he Sun is, as always, a little too quick to give Obama a pass on his lackluster performance in the editorial "Obama and the Oil Spill".
It's not accurate to say that Obama is in the tenuous position of having to "base clean-up efforts on the personnel and equipment of the very company that created this mess".
There are three things that Americans want to see some fast action on: stop the leak, prevent the oil from reaching the shoreline, and quickly clean up the oil that does.
BP and other offshore drilling interests are the experts in stopping the leak, and they need to find a way to do it and get it done.
But when it comes to cleaning up the spill and preventing the oil from reaching the shoreline, the U.S. government has far more equipment, resources and technical knowledge at it's disposal than just BP. And therein lies the frustration of James Carville and millions of other Americans. The federal government is not doing what it could be doing to avert this crisis.
The Administration doesn't appear to understand the enormity of this situation. They understand the political consequences, and seem to be focused on rebuffing the political fallout, but there doesn't seem to be the sense that action is coming first and political positioning second. There isn't a sense that the government is leading the effort, or frankly that they're helping in any way.
Perhaps the only thing more upsetting than the lackluster response of the administration is the fact that Congress is focusing their efforts on reversing the "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" policy of the military as the environmental disaster continues to unfold. But Congress already has a 20% approval, we already know that they're out of touch, and Americans have such low expectation for Congress that nobody seems surprised or to care much that the institution that has oversight of the regulation of offshore drilling has conveniently found far less critical issues to occupy their time.
The Sun may give Obama another pass for another failure, but clearly the American people will not. Despite all of the talk and the rhetoric, American's are looking around and seeing a country that is deeply in debt, under attack from terrorists, has no control of it's borders and quickly ceding a huge portion of it's salt-water shoreline to environmental calamity. No president wants on their resume both the largest federal deficit in American history and the worst environmental disaster in American history, and it's now a certainty that Obama will leave office with both. That alone is all the more reason for him to get his team into action and get more resources to the Southern shoreline, and to focus on protecting our national interests, not his political fortunes.
Editor - bethesite.com
