Befuddled Priorities for the BP Disaster

Admiral Thad Allen announced this morning that it will take years to clean up BP's mess in the Gulf of Mexico. Many people have known this for weeks. President Obama continues to scold BP publicly and insist that it take responsibility. He wants the Big Polluter to clean up, to protect the health of those cleaning up, and to mitigate the economic consequences of the environmental disaster. None of this seems unreasonable.

For its part, the Billionaire Polluter has continued efforts to catch the stream of poison and state that it will take responsibility. Then come the naysayers.

They claim that Obama is asleep at the wheel. It should not come as a surprise that the president is not a petroleum engineer. Some think he should be, or worse, think he can manage a petroleum engineer's worst nightmare as an amateur. They claim, with the typical, radical-right response, that the military should take over the situation. M-16s are fairly ineffective for stopping flowing liquid, but who cares? The fact that the Army Corps of Engineers are civil engineers seems not to figure in the argument. The disaster is beyond the scope of expertise available to the government, yet they call for a government takeover. How many of these same people claimed that health care reform was a government takeover?

Oddly enough, the naysayers do not call for the Big Problem to be punished for creating a Black Plague in the Gulf. Apparently, corporations have the rights of people, but do not need to be disciplined the way people do.

Finally, they call for the president to reverse his moratorium on offshore drilling. The claim is that the economy cannot bear the hardship imposed by the government protecting what is left of our coastal waters.

One question no one seems to be asking is why every effort the Befouling Petroleum Company makes involve catching the flow? A good many people don't give a tinker's damn if the crude ever gets captured as long as it is stopped.

Another question that no one seems to ask is why this has never happened anywhere else. If it has happened, how was it fixed? Could pollution controls in the United States be lax? It seems to be common knowledge that its enforcement of regulations is lax.

Where is the "war council" of the brightest and best minds in the petroleum industry? Americans love to declare war on things like drugs, terrorism and poverty. Where is the war on pollution? What expertise are they not using? There are think-tanks to elect a permanent majority from the radical right to congress. Where is the think tank to stop the pollution? If you live in on the Gulf coast, there may be volunteer opportunities, but they seem not to be well publicized. People who are willing to travel to the region to help will not find much information about where they are needed. Why has no one made it easy for people to volunteer?

Pointing fingers and laying blame is easy. The day will come when blaming and punishing are the right things to do, but it is not yet here. Right now, we need to stop the flow, whether or not it is captured, and clean up the mess.