Obama Regime Has Done Everything Possible To Halt Gulf Oil Spill Cleanup

Stop and think about it for a second.  We could have burned the oil – as per the original contingency plan that had been on the books since 1994.  But the Obama regime wouldn’t allow it.  We could have used dispersants to break down the oil and make it easier to deal with.  But the Obama regime wouldn’t allow it.  We could have borrowed skimmers – and all kinds of other critical equipment and clean-up know-how – from all over the world to collect the oil.  But the Obama regime wouldn’t allow it.  We could have used hundreds of miles of boom that were literally sitting unused in warehouses.  But the Obama regime didn’t bother to obtain it.  We could have built sand berms that would have blocked the oil from reaching the most critical coastal areas.  But the Obama regime has done everything possible to stop it.

June 24, 2010
Feds halt work on LA sand berms
Jeannie DeAngelis

Sand berms are an insurance policy meant to protect the Louisiana coastline from oil spill damage.  The Louisiana sand berm venture involves moving “sand from a mile out in the Gulf of Mexico and pumping it closer in to shore to build manmade barrier islands.”

Nevertheless, lacking a more formidable idea and one week into the project the federal government decided to shut “down the dredging that was being done to create protective sand berms in the Gulf of Mexico.”

Louisiana’s Republican Governor Bobby Jindal staunchly supports protecting the coastline with a sandy barricade, which may explain why the “berm issue has created its own toxic friction between Louisiana and the Obama Administration.”

It seems that ever since Obama took over the reins of reason the government’s first-and-foremost effort is directed at implementing the illogical, obstructing progress and public wellbeing and placing the vulnerable at risk.

Thus, while the duffer- president concentrates on sand bunkers on the golf course, the environmentally alert, “Obama Administration has asked for a halt on dredging sand berms off the Chandeleur Islands … until the project can be relocated farther into the gulf.

Federal costs, environmental concerns and efficiency are likely at the center of the controversy.  As a result, the coast of Louisiana is officially the first victim whose future is at the mercy of an Obama-style “death panel.” Bureaucratic technicalities will determine the extent of damage that will ensue before federal approbation either, administers critical care, or just allows the patient to die, one or the other.

If Obama refuses to lift the ban on the dredging plan Plaquemines Parish President, Billy Nungesser might be the next one called in for a presidential reprimand for public insubordination.

Nungesser, “one of the most vocal advocates of the dredging plan, sent a letter to President Barack Obama, pleading for the work to continue.”  The outspoken sand-berm proponent claims, “Once again, our government resource agencies, which are intended to protect us, are now leaving us vulnerable to the destruction of our coastline and marshes by the impending oil.”

Billy Nungesser targeted Obama as the only “hope for continuing the work.” In an unforgiving dispatch Billy outlined viable options for the President to consider.  Nungesser begged, “Don’t shut us down, let us lay the pipe three miles out and then … move the dredge so we will be down less than a day and we’ll refill the hole.”

Nungesser reminded Obama of the “threat of hurricanes or tropical storms,” which would put the Gulf coast “at an increased risk for devastation … from the intrusion of oil.”

What Nungesser fails to grasp is how a hurricane or tropical storm, coupled with tornadoes of spinning oil would be tailor made for an administration that cultivates and exploits any crisis that fortuitously comes along.

You’re not supposed to notice that Obama’s death panel machine is alive and well, and just waiting to get its chance to decide who lives and who dies in your home.

This disaster of failed leadership comes right after the Obama regime stopped boats involved in vital clean-up efforts for more than a day at a time to ensure that they had fire extinguishers, life jackets, and every single other inane bureaucratic regulation they could think of.

Day 66.  And counting.  Sixty-six days of abject failure.  And even the left recognizes that Obama has been an abject failure.

Instead, we’ve had a bunch of Obama photo ops.  Instead, we’ve had Obama walking on the beach in slacks stopping and stooping to pick up a few tar balls.  Instead, we’ve had a collection of demagogic “here’s someone else you can blame instead of me” speeches.

Obama was previously calling meetings on the subject of whose ass he should kick (needing the bureaucracy of a staff meeting to figure it out).  But he never considered that his own scrawny ass needed a good hard kicking.

As we consider Obama’s failure in the Gulf, let’s not forget that:

Barack Obama took more money from BP than any politician over a twenty year period.  In spite of the fact that he had only been in national politics for less than three years.  Barack Obama’s administration approved the project and granted the permit for the doomed BP drilling site.  Barack Obama’s administration helped quash environmental problems and issued an environmental waiver to BP at said doomed site only days before the disaster.  Barack Obama failed to take the disaster seriously and delayed serious action for weeks, fiddling with fundraisers, golf outings, and vacations while the Gulf went to hell.  The Obama administration has continued to delay and waste time pursuing the dotting of the i’s and the crossing of the t’s regarding mindless bureaucratic inanities.

And what has Obama proposed as his solution?  Nothing that could cap the damn hole, but his socialist cap-and-trade which he himself said would cause energy prices to “necessarily skyrocket.”  In the spirit of never letting a good crisis go to waste, Obama has stoked the boilers for more Marxism.  And the more oil that pours across our coasts, the better.

What has Obama proposed?  He has proposed a ban, or moratorium, on offshore drilling.  Would this cost a permanent loss of tens of thousands of jobs (in fact, well over 100,000 jobs) as drilling platform operators relocate long-term to other countries?  Of course it would.  Would it in fact actually result in more danger to the environment, as it would entail capping and then eventually uncapping wells – the most dangerous part of the entire drilling procedure, as we should frankly all realize by now?  Of course it would.  Would it effectively amount to a ban on ALL American drilling, such that we were at the complete mercy of foreign oil who presumably have the basic intelligence to not undermine their own economies and their own security?  Of course it would.

Fortunately, a judge struck down Obama’s newest naked power grab as “overbearing,” “rash,” and “heavy handed.”  In other words, Obama acted in an incredibly Stalinist manner, didn’t he?

You’d almost think Obama was the Manchurian President, destroying America on purpose in his pursuit of the Cloward and Piven strategy for a Marxist America.  It has got to be either that, or he is so shockingly incompetent that it is utterly unreal.  Which scenario is more the frightening, I frankly don’t know.