Where's the big government in the Gulf?

G

Ghost of Cutten

Not that Obama is the only guy of this type, Bush was a Big Government type also, as was Clinton before him, and was Bush I as well, but...

Obama has promoted big government solutions to the financial crisis, to contract law in bankruptcy cases, to employer/employee relations, to judge selection, to firearms ownership, to trade etc. He seems pretty in favour of big government.

Why then, in one of the few cases where the state actually has a legitimate concern (i.e. property rights and the safety of the country) is he standing back and letting it play out without government intervention? Surely even a small government should be responding to a natural disaster, just as it would to a war or other major threatening event, yet here the big government proponents are doing almost nothing to stop the oil leak.

This seems a very strange set of priorities - stick the state in where it's not needed, doesn't belong, and causes harm; and keep the state out of those areas where its presence is necessary and beneficial.
 
He can't cap the well-head, no government entity has the necessary equipment or experience. The Navy goes deep but its only salvage stuff and nothing helpful to this problem. He has to go to industry and BP is there and has the heavy equipment already on the water. Not much room for him to make a difference there.

Where Obama really screwed up was the area where he could have made a difference and that is protecting the shoreline with berms, jettys and floating capture mechanisms. Alot of the pristine inner waterways in Florida could have been saved by simply placing oil-booms across one narrow inlet. Its totally unforgivable that those necessary actions did not take place. Alot of the damage that is occuring did not have to happen.
 
"The Obama administration “forced” BP Plc to take more aggressive steps to deal with the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel said when asked about the government’s response to the nation’s worst environmental disaster on ABC’s “This Week.”

The Obama administration pushed BP to deploy new containment measures, demanded two relief wells be drilled instead of one and forced the company to agree to a $20 billion relief fund, Emanuel said on the ABC program.

“BP originally was going to do one relief well. We forced them to do a second relief well. They weren’t going to do that,” Emanuel said. There were “a lot of things that they had to be pushed to do. And pushed to do faster, more of,” Emanuel said.

The BP well is gushing as much as 60,000 barrels of oil a day, according to a government estimate. The spill, which has washed ashore in four states, was caused by an April 20 explosion on the Deepwater Horizon drilling rig that killed 11 workers.

BP recovered 24,500 barrels of oil from the well June 19, the company said. Emanuel said he expects the company to be able to capture about 90 percent of the leaking oil by the middle of next month."
 
Quote from Ghost of Cutten:

Why then. . . is he standing back and letting it play out without government intervention?
More...

`Cuz it's going to be a fuster cluck no matter what. Even Big Government fanatics realize that this mess is beyond the powers of their God to solve. If The One hangs back some, he can point to BP as the Evil Incompetent who could not clean up or made all of the mistakes, then speak of yet another failure of capitialism and free markets.

If The One was actively overseeing everything with His Divine Powers, there'd still be screwups and He would take the blame.

This is going to be a huge disaster. 20 years from now, people will remember this more than they remember the Exxon Valdez. The One would like to get as little oil spilled on Big Government as possible.
 
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