Get with it already

From Huffington: ‘The government regulator with oversight of offshore drilling allowed industry officials to fill in their own inspection reports and federal employees accepted gifts—including meals and tickets to sporting events—from oil and natural gas companies, according to a new report by the Interior Department's Inspector General’.

‘The report was prompted by an anonymous letter dated October 28, 2008 which alleged that several MMS [Mineral Management Service] employees accepted gifts, including skeet-shooting contests, crawfish boils and fishing trips, from the Island Operating Company, an oil and gas production company that works on oil platforms. Among the employees was an MMS supervisor in the New Orleans office, who was later fired’.

I wonder if President Obama will retaliate against the leaker of that dirty little secret for revealing restricted government data. It would be consistent, after all, as Obama guns for leakers in the full Bush/Cheney tradition, racking up another indictment today against a guy who depantsed his bosses at the National Security Agency. The NSA is that lovely outfit that listens in to our telephone calls and reads our e-mails, now without fear of legal interference thanks to both the current president and his predecessor.

The whole crew at Interior, including this grotesque parody of a ‘regulatory’ agency called MMS, looks like exactly where a true reformer truly prepared for some ‘hopey-changey’ stuff would have directed some icy stares upon taking office. Instead, Obama rushed to authorize new offshore drilling in March of this year without even a cursory review of the environmental safety issues, looking once again as if he were more concerned to placate his right-wing enemies than to listen to the people who put him in office.

Now that the entire Gulf of Mexico has become an open-air petroleum pit, Obama has belatedly named a commission to examine what went wrong. Both of the first two names are old-time Washington insiders: Bush Senior’s EPA chief and a former senator from Florida.

Ho hum. All this lumbering bureaucratic machinery might have made sense BEFORE changing the policy and BEFORE the disaster. Now it looks lame as shit.

Even Obama’s rhetoric sounds like he’s presiding over a ribbon-cutting for the new high school gymnasium rather than responding to a huge national environmental emergency.

‘I can’t think of two people who will bring greater experience or better judgment to the task at hand’, Obama said in his weekly radio address. Who the fuck cares? How about stopping the oil leak?

A Louisiana senator, Republican David Vitter, sounded more p.o.’d—no, more in touch with reality—than Obama, when he said that ‘the time for committee hearings is for after the well has been capped, not before’.

I’m sorry, but when you’re being outflanked as a populist champion by a corrupt whoremonger-extraordinaire like Vitter, there’s something seriously wrong with your approach to governing. The BP spill is not yet Obama’s Katrina, but it is heading straight in that direction.