The Devil Take the Hindmost

In a way I feel bad for Obama, not because his approval ratings are down, that goes with the territory, or even because McChrystal couldn’t remember what he was doing in Afghanistan, or even because the Russians don’t like chili dogs, but because, like Arnie in California, the job is impossible. Like I said before the election, the Rove/Cheney/Bush abyss may be too vast for any mortal human being to span in one lifetime. It is a no-win job that the republicans should have had responsibility for fixing as much as for breaking. But Arnie has only managed to confirm that the republicans can’t fix anything except their wallets. In spite of good intentions, Arnie gets hit from every direction. (http://politics.newsvine.com/_news/2010/06/26/4566213-gop-schwarzenegger-a-great-disappointment

Obama was the only hope, and I hate to see him go down in a thankless, impossible job, but he asked for it, so he gets the credit for not fixing it just as much as the Dubya Posse gets credit for breaking it. The opportunity to rise above the occasion for Dubya was exceeded only by the opportunity to screw it up, and so he did, leaving a legacy that even a sincere republican like Arnie can’t touch.

As for comparing Deepwater Horizon with Katrina, all Bush had to do to be a hero in New Orleans was to evacuate the sports dome and the hospital in two days. That’s all it would have taken. They would have forgiven everything else over time, but the pressure on law enforcement and resources in the city with no place for people to go turned into a spectacle that we’ll remember for a lifetime.

Military trucks, vessels, and aircraft a hundred miles away never moved, and the final irony was that the airport was still operational. That’s what really pissed people off, and likewise intensified resentment of every other perceived inadequacy of the response. After that, it was prove you can do better than New Orleans, instead of we are so glad to have some help.

As for fixing Deepwater Horizon, what in the hell was Obama supposed to do? This was not a regularly occurring natural disaster like a hurricane. The only domes involved are a mile under water, and there isn’t any known device in existence to manage the results. All he could do was stand on the beach and jump up and down. The Navy doesn’t have a huge stock of oil containment equipment. Yeah, somebody should have been ready to deal with this kind of problem. We know blowouts happen. We know BOPs can fail. We know working a mile under water is tricky, but republicans and other conservatives are always whining about big government and free enterprise. Nobody wanted to put responsibility for another expensive project on the government when they already had so much invested in cozy regulatory relationships. Does this remind you of anything, like the SEC? The industry could have cooperated on joint development of equipment and planning for contingency protection, but that would have been a quasi-government function. Chalk another one up for free enterprise, and let the devil take the hindmost. Only problem is, the hindmost is us.

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Iffy