You clean it up

What better example of what Tony Judt called in his recent NYU speech the combination of vast ‘private affluence and public squalor’ than the destruction of half our coastline by the rapacious oil companies. Some of the usual mean spirits already have dubbed the Gulf oil spill as ‘Obama’s Katrina’, which is the closest they come to acknowledging that their hero’s performance in the original one was somewhat inadequate. That will generate knee-jerk defenses of the federal government’s handling of the disaster from people with a weird attachment to the Democratic Party, but in this case it will involve acrobatics that would make Cirque du Soleil proud.

Obama’s on his own with this one. It was his decision to issue the executive order to expand offshore drilling and make the bizarre spectacle of thousands of fat white guys (led by their token, Michael Steele) chanting ‘Drill, Baby, Drill’ at the Republic National Convention his own cause. What exactly he thought he was getting in exchange for jettisoning his environmental allies on a crucial issue is not very clear given the ongoing, ferocious denial of global warming issuing from the Palin/Beck/Huckabee camp.

No, smart guys in the White House, this is your catastrophe to deal with, your time to convince us that you know best and that the people who elected you can be arbitrarily ignored through executive order when big, important deals are to be cut with the powerful.

Speaking of executive orders, how curious that the one Obama could issue to speed up the slow, ridiculous, agonizing decline and decease of Don’t Ask/Don’t Tell is nowhere to be seen. Now Defense Secretary Gates, a hold-over from the Bush horror that we voted against, is saying that we should wait for the issue to be ‘studied’ some more as if the evidence that the policy is bigoted and useless has not yet been accumulated. ‘Our military must be afforded the opportunity to inform us of their concerns’, said Gates with Obama’s silent consent. Harry Truman didn’t think ending racial segregation in the ranks needed years of research—he just did it.

As we watch the oil seep into our national shoreline, we can contemplate just how far from democratic rule and the people’s will we have moved as the Obama team scrambles to explain to us why the huge oil companies should be allowed to continue to wreck our planet—oh, and also why we should rush out in November to defend the party that wipes its collective behind with the mandate of 2008.