Obama's MOR BS

‘So the answer is not drilling everywhere all the time. But the answer is not, also, for us to ignore the fact that we are going to need vital energy sources to maintain our economic growth and our security. Ultimately, we need to move beyond the tired debates of the left and the right, between business leaders and environmentalists, between those who would claim drilling is a cure all and those who would claim it has no place. Because this issue is just too important to allow our progress to languish while we fight the same old battles over and over again’. -Barack Obama, Andrews Air Force Base, March 31, 2010

This lame I’m-so-moderate approach is typical of Obama, who thinks he can observe people’s passionate differences from on high and find the truth eternally located somewhere in the middle. Like those who dismiss arguments about torture as mere ‘tired debates’ when the reasonable, adult posture is something in between, like, Only do it sometimes and then feel terrible about it.

The tired left v. right debaters on off-shore oil drilling whom Obama refers to would then be, um, Al Gore and George W. Bush? Remind me of that next election cycle when we’re being browbeaten to rush out and vote for Democrats because they’re SO not the bad guys.

I’m reminded of the difficulties faced by colleagues at National Public Radio who were never permitted to let anyone say anything without ‘balancing’ it with a neutralizing, opposite view. One poor young woman was at her wit’s end trying to find something to ‘balance’ a Guatemalan death squad leader who in an interview had justified snatching people from their beds and ripping them to pieces in dungeons.

Although it is height of hypocrisy to call the BP oil slick ‘Obama’s Katrina’, he did abandon the moral high ground when he chose to ignore those bad old extremist environmental groups who warned that off-shore drilling was not safe and to authorize more of it. A more sincere moderate would have held off on a decision and invited the interested parties to a policy review that might have exposed the miserably incompetent governmental regulatory oversight before the fact rather than after. Not that it was much of a secret, had Obama chosen to ask.

So now we have a world-class ecological disaster that the federal government seems clueless to address with Obama doing his usual above-the-fray number and issuing stern-daddy warnings as the oil-pool wriggles slowly past the Florida Keys en route to the Atlantic. It might be more convincing had the Obama Administration not permitted BP to hide its video of the gushing pipe from public view for three weeks while playing it live inside the White House.

So much for Mr Middle-of-the-Road who increasingly looks and sounds like a bad imitation of Bill Clinton.