You can't spend what you ain't got/ You can't lose what you ain't never had -
Muddy WatersPresident Barack Hussein Obama finally deigned to address the nation regarding the Gulf Oil spill last night, and it was a memorable occasion. Not for anything he said,of course, but because it's going to be seen in the future as the point where even many of his True Believers finally realized that the emperor really is naked. And it wasn't a pretty sight.
After 56 days, what we got last night was 18 minutes of platitudes, only about 10 minutes of which actually dealt with the oil spill at all. The rest of it was essentially about how we're going to spend a trillion dollars we don't have to try to power our society on windmills and unicorn farts.
The oil spill part of the speech could perhaps have passed muster maybe on Day 3 of the spill. Almost two months into it, with local officials at their wit's end and seventeen federal agencies tripping over each other to comply with Federal diktats that are often contradictory and counterproductive, it was an insult to our intelligence.
Obama seems to have known that too. The first part of his speech was robotic and strained, although,like all bad actors his out of control hands revealed his nervousness and discomfort.
The short version of what we heard from President Ass Kicker last night was:
'we are engaged in a Great War On Oil Slick comparable to WWII and putting a man on the moon, and dammit, I'm going to make BP pay for this.I'll unleash the lawyers. Meanwhile, to show that I'm actually doing something, I came down to the beach, ate a bunch of seafood, appointed another czar and shut down all offshore oil drilling. The spill was really Bush's fault, and anyway, what we really need to do is pass the largest tax increase in our history with cap and trade and get off oil entirely, because we're running out of places to drill.Thankyooverahmuch ladies and gentlemen, G'night!'The truth of the matter is that Obama has done little or nothing to date about the spill because he was willing to delegate it to others, and they were unwilling to be decisive without a nod from Obama. Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal asked for federal approval within days after the spill to do the extra dredging to build sand berms and barrier Islands to keep the oil off the coast and only got an approval a week ago when he finally got fed up, went loudly public and said he was going to build the barrier islands and berms whether they were approved or not.
The President had nothing to say in his speech last night about why the US refused to accept
skimmers and expert assistance from the Dutch, or help from the Norwegians or from
13 other countries who offered aid in cleaning up the Gulf. Or why literally miles of oil booms are sitting in a Maine warehouse despite the fact that the administration was
told about the supply almost a month ago.
This kind of inaction is nothing new for him, by the way. He behaved exactly the same way when it came to disasters in
Kentucky and
Nashville, except he didn't even give them the courtesy of a speech.
And by shutting down off shore drilling at a time when the country's in a deep recession, the president has
likely idled 46,200 high paying jobs, and long term job losses could reach 120,000 by 2014.Not to mention the lost oil production and the accompanying hit on the economy.
Obama's handling of the Gulf Spill makes George W. Bush's handling of Hurricane Katrina look positively masterful..and I never thought I’d say
thatIn the last part of his speech, President Obama piled it on even deeper, talking about how we're running out of places to drill for oil and citing China as an example of a country that is investing in 'green energy'.
The truth? We're far from running out of places to drill. This
report from the non-partisan Congressional Research Service estimates that the US has over 167 billion barrels of recoverable oil, a 75 year supply. And that doesn’t include our huge shale oil deposits or the huge amount of oil we could process cleanly and synthetically from the gasification of our coal reserves, technology that already exists.
And China? The 'green energy' the Chinese are investing in is nuclear power. Along with every source of oil they can get their hands on, including long term leases in Iraq, the fields Halliburton was able to save after Saddam set the wells on fire after we invaded.
The Chinese are smart enough to realize that nuclear energy is the only renewable energy that can run a booming economy as effectively and efficiently as fossil fuels. And while Obama has issued a lot of verbiage about nuclear power, he hasn't ordered even one new nuclear power plant to be built and has kept the approval process arcane and difficult to cater to his far Left environmentalist supporters - many who either already are or look to be making millions in government dollars for pushing things like biomass or wind energy.
As an interesting contrast, here's
Governor Sarah Palin's take on this. Does anyone have any doubts that if she were in the White House even as vice president, this would have been handled very differently?
Aside from the obvious platitudes and prevarications, what we saw last night was the end of the Obama myth, and even a lot of his faithful soldiers on the Left recognized it, if you look at the various reactions to the speech. Even Mr. Thrill-up-my-leg, AKA Chris Matthews noticed how naked the emperor was last night.
