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.

Obama Total Failure As Leader: Even Uber Liberals Throwing Obama Overboard In Gulf Disaster

If you see Obama covered in oil, it’s because a gang of liberals shoved him overboard into the sticky muck.

It appears that things are really getting desperate for the left.  Leftwing journalists, who have always been such reliable propagandists for Democrats, might finally be at that point where they realize if they don’t report the truth, their viewers will go to those that will.

From the gang of liberals at MSNBC:

MSNBC Trashes Obama’s Address: Compared To Carter, “I Don’t Sense Executive Command” Chris Matthews, Keith Olbermann and Howard Fineman react to President Obama’s Oval Office Address on the oil spill. Here are the highlights of what the trio said:

Olbermann: “It was a great speech if you were on another planet for the last 57 days.”

Matthews compared Obama to Carter.

Olbermann: “Nothing specific at all was said.”

Matthews: “No direction.”

Howard Fineman: “He wasn’t specific enough.”

Olbermann: “I don’t think he aimed low, I don’t think he aimed at all. It’s startling.”

Howard Fineman: Obama should be acting like a “commander-in-chief.”

Matthews: Ludicrous that he keeps saying [Secretary of Energy] Chu has a Nobel prize. “I’ll barf if he does it one more time.”

Matthews: “A lot of meritocracy, a lot of blue ribbon talk.”

Matthews: “I don’t sense executive command.”

VIDEO: Obama: Oil Disaster “Most Painful And Powerful Reminder” That We Need Clean Energy

VIDEO: Krauthammer: Obama Gave It A Shot, But The Story Will Not Be His Speech

VIDEO: Frank Luntz Focus Group On Obama’s Address: “Negative”

Here’s the Youtube video in which the above comments were made:

From the New York Times:

From the beginning, the effort has been bedeviled by a lack of preparation, organization, urgency and clear lines of authority among federal, state and local officials, as well as BP. As a result, officials and experts say, the damage to the coastline and wildlife has been worse than it might have been if the response had been faster and orchestrated more effectively.

“The present system is not working,” Senator Bill Nelson of Florida said Thursday at a hearing in Washington devoted to assessing the spill and the response. Oil had just entered Florida waters, Senator Nelson said, adding that no one was notified at either the state or local level, a failure of communication that echoed Mr. Bonano’s story and countless others along the Gulf Coast.

“The information is not flowing,” Senator Nelson said. “The decisions are not timely. The resources are not produced. And as a result, you have a big mess, with no command and control.”

They were supposed to be better prepared. When the Exxon Valdez ran aground in Alaska in 1989, skimmers, booms and dispersants were in short supply for the response, which was led by a consortium of oil companies in which BP was the majority stakeholder.

A year later, lawmakers passed the federal Oil Pollution Act to ensure that plans were in place for oil spills, so the response effort would be quick, with clear responsibilities for everyone involved.

No skimmers were available when the Exxon Valdes ran aground.  And – thanks to our fool-in-chief Barry Hussein – when we had a chance to get some much needed assistance to supply much-needed skimmers, Barry apparently thought they said, “We’d like to send you winners” and turned them down fearing they would make him look bad.

U.S. and BP slow to accept Dutch expertiseBy LOREN STEFFY –  Houston Chronicle – 06/08/2010

Three days after the explosion of the Deepwater Horizon in the Gulf of Mexico, the Dutch government offered to help.

It was willing to provide ships outfitted with oil-skimming booms, and it proposed a plan for building sand barriers to protect sensitive marshlands.

The response from the Obama administration and BP, which are coordinating the cleanup: “The embassy got a nice letter from the administration that said, ‘Thanks, but no thanks,’” said Geert Visser, consul general for the Netherlands in Houston.

Now, almost seven weeks later, as the oil spewing from the battered well spreads across the Gulf and soils pristine beaches and coastline, BP and our government have reconsidered.

So we’ve got this complete, unmitigated, and inexcusable disaster:

Had Obama accepted the offer back then and not allowed BP to use illegal dispersants, the oil would have never made landfall 48 miles away.

Today, (a month and half to late) there are US tankers that are steaming to the site with four pairs of modern skimming booms that were airlifted from the Netherlands and should be sucking up oil at the flow site within days.

Each pair can process 5 million gallons of water a day, removing 20,000 tons of oil and sludge.

If those skimmers were in place when they were offered a month ago, each pair could presumably recover 4.4 million barrels of oil. Four pairs of the state of the art skimmers would be able to suck up 17.6 million barrels in a month, although they will not be able to reach the depths of the plumes that are floating away with the illegal dispersants.

Thirteen nations offered to give us help to mitigate this massive disaster.  And Obama basically wrote, “To whom it may concern, please to get the hell out of my business” letters to all of them.

And, of course, this failure is too big for just one inexcusable and stupid and unforgivable abandonment of leadership, judgment, and basic common sense.  In addition to the “Thanks, but up yours” response to other nations’ offers to supply skimmers, Obama also allowed MILES of boom that would have been hugely important in protecting the coasts to sit useless in warehouses:

UNBELIEVABLE! How’s this for HOPE AND CHANGE?

Tar blobs began washing up on Florida’s white sand beaches near Pensacola this past weekend. Crude oil has already been reported along barrier islands in Alabama and Mississippi, and has impacted about 125 miles of Louisiana coastline.

It didn’t have to be this way.

(Reuters)
There are miles of floating oil containment boom in warehouse right now and the manufacturer Packgen says it can make lots more on short notice.
There’s just one problem… No one will come get it.

It’s unfair to compare Bush’s failure at the 500-year hurricane striking the worst possible location with Obama’s failure in this oil leak disaster – Obama’s failure is incommensurately worse.

And the American people know it.  A new poll–by a left leaning public opinion firm–finds that:

Our new Louisiana poll has a lot of data points to show how unhappy voters in the state are with Barack Obama’s handling of the oil spill but one perhaps sums it up better than anything else- a majority of voters there think George W. Bush did a better job with Katrina than Obama’s done dealing with the spill.

50% of voters in the state, even including 31% of Democrats, give Bush higher marks on that question compared to 35% who pick Obama.

Since Obama was elected, I’ve been saying that a third of American voters would continue to support Obama even if he led us into the stone-age-like conditions that Kim Il Jong has led his people into.  We could be living in the dark and freezing at night, and scratching our own fecal matter from the ground in order to have something to burn, and this group of people would still adore their Dear Leader.

And what is Obama’s response to this terrible crisis?  Well, his golf game certainly hasn’t suffered in any way.  He’s been very busy doing fundraisers so his fellow liberal buddies can have a chance to stay in office.  He got a nice vacation in.

Oh, and he gave a speech.  A speech in which Obama sought to seize advantage of the disaster in order to impose his monstrous and disastrous cap-and-trade system that would cause energy prices to “necessarily skyrocket.”  Obama is no leader who can possibly solve this crisis; he is rather a demagogic community organizer who can only seek to ideologically benefit from the crisis.

And MSNBC and the New York Times aren’t the only liberals who realize the disastrous and disgraceful failure that Obama has been.  Longtime liberal Democrat political strategist James Carville realized it.  Liberal journalist and former Clinton administration public affairs hack Kirsten Powers realized it.  I’m sure a lot of other liberal media pukes are realizing that we’re coming to the place where they either throw Obama overboard for his incompetence, or demonstrate that they themselves are clearly incompetent in their analysis.

I like the way the American Thinker concludes on Obama’s performance:

The utter lack of leadership and hands-on management in responding to the Gulf oil crisis is an embarrassment to the President, as well as a hideous disaster for the Gulf and those who live near it. Can Obama’s first-ever Oval Office address make the damage to his standing go away? I seriously doubt it. Obama has failed in his duty to protect the homeland through sheer inexperience, incompetence, and indolence. The man who has planty of time for golf, hoops, parties, and fund-raisers is asleep at the switch when it comes to making the system respond effectively to an emergency. There is no papering over the spectacle with rhetoric.

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