*sigh*
I’m exasperated by our current events. Obama… Yeah… He did another talk. He said a bunch of things he and his team determined would garner him support, based on their analysis. “I’m sticking a moratorium on offshore oil.”
Why? Because offshore oil is in the news and people are angry at it? No. Apparently we want to find out if there’s like – trouble – or something, with drilling.
I’ve been tempted to make the argument against a moratorium. You know, point out the chances of another exploding rig, the magnitude of difference between the cost of this spill and the much greater cost of the moratorium, the fact we’ll replace the offshore oil with imported oil, and the fact that the gulf coast economy is half fishing/tourism and half offshore oil. And don’t forget we NEED oil. A reality with 200 million electric cars running on wind-generated electricity is a little ways off, and we can’t get there without oil.
Obama tried telling us he’s got things under control – he’s doing the right stuff – everything’s being done right now. Yeah, Obama is like the flight attendant on Die Hard 2 who tells McClain’s wife they have plenty of fuel, but an hour later the pilots are attempting a desperate night landing on a terrorist controlled runway with no lights in the middle of the night during a blizzard without ground clearance.
And Obama is using the crisis as a stick to hit his opposition to the cap and trade bill. Not the best tactic if you ask me. To anyone directly affected by the disaster, it will seem cheap – a politician tapping us for political capital. To people already apposed to tricky taxes on energy, it will also look cheap. The only people buying the idea that an oil leak is a reason to tax carbon are the people already wanting to tax carbon.
- All this without talking about stopping the leak. All he said was that BP would be recovering up to 90% of the oil gushing out – soon. Up to? Seriously? Is this an ad for a weight loss program???
If I had to describe the address in a tweet, it would be thus: Obama trying to talk himself out of trouble.
As for Obama’s support regardless of the address, this one is just another bean for sorting. The same Democrats who were blaming anything and everything on Bush – and are still – are now defending Obama with the simple logic that eluded them so throughout most of this decade. And the same Republicans who were defending Bush are now content to let Obama drown in the sea of ignorant public perception, finding it a just irony.
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Raging Kitty