Mossback’s “Built to spill”
Knute Berger is one of our favorite columnists and in a recent Crosscut piece he makes sense of all the madness surround the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. To wit:
In the eyes of his critics, Barack Obama can't win. He compromised with Republicans on off-shore drilling, but the big spill in the gulf brings him attacks on two fronts from the right. First, is the ridiculous and non-credible assertion that he wanted a bad spill to derail his own policy (this made by the infamous "Brownie" of Katrina fame, so consider the source); and second that the disaster happening on his watch is Obama's Katrina.
The latter attack is to shift blame. Katrina was a natural disaster the response to which was largely botched, in part by Brownie's debased FEMA. The oil spill was a man-made disaster and the culprit an oil company. By focusing the blame on the federal response (alleged to be tardy), drilling proponents want to deflect responsibility for the policies that contributed to the fiasco.
(Image courtesy of apolloalliance.)
But the former idea, that Obama could benefit from the gulf spill, is also coming from some Democrats. They're not claiming that he caused it, or dragged his feet to make it worse, but rather that he can use the situation to turn crude into green lemonade. This is articulated by commentators like New York Times columnist Paul Krugman, who hopes that images and outrage will usher in a new eco-era. Pictures of dead birds will inspire folks to clean up the planet's act. This is not Obama's Katrina, it's his Cuyahoga, the toxic Ohio river that caught fire. "The catastrophe in the gulf offers an opportunity, a chance to recapture some of the spirit of the original Earth Day. And if that happens, some good may yet come of this ecological nightmare," writes Krugman.
However, history proves Krugman’s hopes to be ill-founded. Horrors of Vietnam didn’t deter us from invading Iraq; Three Mile Island didn’t stop nuclear power; and there will be offshore drilling. Dream on, Berger concludes. Full column HERE.
