Obama's Oil Spill
 

Ed Schultz, as blue as blue gets, now says what most of us are thinking:

http://www.realclearpolitics.com/vid...oil_spill.html

After all, if the liberals can jump on George Bush after 3 days for Hurricane Katrina, Obama can get some heat after 35 days of "hope and change" while actually doing nothing.

i'm sure obama is hoping it gets taken care of soon.

Man of Action, he ain't!

It's getting ridiculous now.

I wonder if anyone will suggest that Obama is a racist since most of the shrimp fisherman affected are white, kind of like the reverse of the Katrina situation.

Paybacks are brutal...

Are shrimp fishermen dying?*

Absolutely awful comparisons are brutal.

* said from the agreeable POV that Bush's handling of Katrina was not racist, just pathetic.

Would the response be any different?

Face it, your boy is a slapdick.

Exactly -- it's the response time that's being compared.

An interesting hypothetical....but definitely not at all what joey was asking in that post I responded to.

At least Bush had a legitimate excuse. He is borderline retarded.

Obama made all of these promises and so far is a colossal failure. His only excuse is a lack of experience and the blame solely falls on my generation, the one full of retards, putting him in office.

The majority of people that died were beyond helping. The blame falls on Nagin and the clueless fat broad who was Governor at the time. The evacuation was a clusterf.uck of epic proportions.

Multiple administrations are to blame for the levees not being up to par.

I can exempt myself from that blame: I didn't vote for him.

Cheer up though -- I don't know that more experience would have helped Obama because of his extraordinarily warped leftist point of view.

Don't disagree entirely, take that up with Kanye, but not at all germane to joey's original ridiculous question.

It wasn't a ridiculous question -- it wasn't a serious one. But it does highlight the ridiculous double standard used by the media, since there are similarities in the scale of the two disasters, and the fact that both were not acted on immediately.

Three days is a lot closer to immediate than 37 days is though.

If that's meant to highlight a double standard for the media, then it also highlights a complete inability on your part to discern whether dying is the same as losing your livelihood. If you think that those two things are on equal footing to try to "highlight" anything, then we may simply have entirely different worldviews.

I mean, we may as well ask while we're at it -- unemployment is high in the country, and there are more white folks in America than anyone else, and Obama's in charge, so that would almost certainly make him a racist too, right? Same thing as people dying, completely, I see no difference whatsoever.

It wasn't a horrible comparison...maybe not the best one, however.

The fishing industry is kapoot in the Gulf. The people who are affected by this might as well be dead. It's not like the majority of them are highly educated. How are they going to provide for their families now? The settlement checks some of them are taking now will prevent them from suing BP in the future and the ones who wait it out for the lawsuit will be waiting for years.

This disaster was preventable and only happened because of the powerful oil lobby and corrupt government employees who took bribes and turned a blind eye to the safety violations.

You're missing the point -- can we agree that race did not belong in either assessment of the response to the respective crises?

In otherwords, will the left admit, now that their guy can be viewed the same way, that Bush was not in fact a racist as a result of his handling of the Katrina aftermath?

Of course, I'd also expect all the public figures who said that Bush had special forces people detonating the levees to also retract their statements and issue an apology to Bush and his family.

In 5 + weeks since this deal started, our President has barely commented on the situation other than to appoint some special commission to affix blame 6 months from now. Meanwhile, there is no coordination and little help from the feds while fishermen organize themselves to wage an impossible battle against an approaching oil slick. Obama was more concerned with the primary elections, the semantics of a state immigration bill he hasn't read, and the campaign for his Supreme Court appointee, while the Gulf of Mexico has been ruined for a generation.

If he really had his "boot on the throat of BP" he would have taken this deal over very early on. This isn't about policy, point of view, party lines, or vision for the future, this is about taking charge in a crisis to demand action and limit the damage, and this is a miserable failure. The question about his leadership in a crisis has been answered, and it leaves this country with a scary outlook for his term his President.

Wow.

I see no reasonable way to compare dying to losing a job. Not even if you're uneducated, not even if you lose your livelihood, not for anything, since you know, you're still NOT DEAD.

I was not aware that "Bush is a racist" was the left's party line on the handling on Katrina. For some, sure, but not as a whole I don't believe. So unfortunately, I'm not able to answer this question the way you've framed because I reject it out of hand.

Race shouldn't be involved in any discussion of the response to these disasters -- that I can agree on, but the whole apology from the left, retractions, etc, I can't get behind because like I said, you've framed it in a way that I don't believe is accurate to begin with.

An instant death by disaster is no different than a slow one. Do you not agree that lives will be destroyed due to this disaster? How about suicides?

It is a family tradition to some of these fishermen. Generations of work lost due to incompetence and greed by the government.

Rebuilding will be an impossible obstacle for some of them to overcome.

And remember that most of these fishermen and their families dealt with Katrina as well. It's a double whammy of bad luck.

From our conversations on these boards, I can detect that you are a more rational guy, and I respect you.

There was a lot of coverage when all the Katrina stuff first broke to the effect of a racial component, and it was brought up again leading up to the election in the Louisiana area.

There actually were conspiracy theories put forward saying Bush blew up the levees, probably believed by the same nutjobs who watched "Fahrenheit 911" and think that the twin towers were brought down by "controlled demolition" -- like Rosie O'Donnell.

Those are the people I'd like to verbally tear apart.

Lives destroyed. People lose jobs all the time. Generations of work or not, it's a lost job. A decreased standard of living or a need to learn to do something else is still not dying. I'm not saying for a second that this isn't a catastrophic life event for lots of people -- but it's not the same as dying, because there is a chance to do something else and a chance to still live a life....just because it's not the one you're used to or because it's not the one you want doesn't make it equal in any way to literally DYING.

And suicide is almost universally an elective decision, so again, not the same thing at all. Unfortunate, yes, but still a choice so I'm not willing to take people drowning in a disaster they had no control over on equal footing with someone who puts a bullet into their head because their life isn't what it used to be. Maybe that's just me.

Well, those people were lunatics before the oil spill. They haven't been exposed as any crazier than they already were just because Obama is f*cking up the response. They were out of their minds to begin with and not exactly the kind of people that I by and large think represent the left, but they may be for all I know....just not the people on the left that I personally know.

Why? Most of the people who decided to stay in New Orleans for Katrina were suicidal. Or at the very least had suicidal tendencies. This excludes those without means to get out and the mentally retarded.

Any rational person could see that Katrina was going to wreak havoc at least 4 days before it hit land. They had time to get out.

The fishing industry was stuck like Chuck.

Who the hell cares? What on earth does this have to do with the BP spill? Congrats, you've established that the left has out of touch conspiracy theorists. Jesus Christ, you take a stance that even I can agree with (Obama is sitting on his hands w/the spill) and manage to screw that up by grinding some five-year-old axe about some nonsense said by people who no one listens to anyway. Get a grip.

So that somehow means it's equal to literally dying, where if they had some advance warning, it would be different?

I don't follow your line of thinking or the way you see the loss of a job as equal to death. I'd pretty universally rather be unemployed than dead, in fact I can't think of a single instance in which I'd rather be dead -- no polling on the topic, but I'm pretty sure most would not equate job loss, no matter how important and specialized, as being give or take the same thing as just being actually dead.

Will agree to disagree on this one again, because there's obviously a huge disconnect between how we see jobs vs. dying, and there's no way to advance a conversation about it.

I said might as well be dead. Big difference, Brian. The stress that some of these people are facing is going to be unbelievable and the majority of them won't have insurance or the means to see a therapist. Instead they'll be put on depression meds and in zombie mode to deal with life.

And I would rather be dead than live life like that.

I just heard on the radio that they are in the middle of trying that "Top Kill" procedure, with the cement and aggregate. Hopefully it will work.

Keep your fingers crossed. At least then the amount of oil will not be increasing, and we can focus all manpower on getting it cleaned up.

In no way minimizing what these people are about to go through -- but this happens everywhere in this country, every single day. If people get put in terrible, stressful, spots and feel lost and want to check out and kill themselves or wish they were dead, that's their call. If they want to try to find a way to recover, that's their choice too.

But I can't envision a single scenario in which I would choose the former, and for as much as it may seem out of character for someone like me, I'm not exactly bursting at the seams with sympathy for people who do.

Just like I don't have sympathy for people who had ample time to get out of town.

All O'Dumbass cares about BP is how much money BP is going to give him for the 2012 elections. He could care less about these people's work going down the drain because of this oil spill. Its no secret that BP has given him a nice sum of money in the past. Lets put two and two together.

The irony in complaining about BP giving money to a Democrat, much less one who defeated the King of Oil is pretty cool.

http://mediamatters.org/blog/2010052...+-+County+Fair)

Well, I guess that's that. Next.

the most disgusting part of this article is how much :$::$: these slimebag politicians (not just Obama, all of them) waste for a Freaking election campaign.

800 million? disgusting

I'm curious Joey, since one of the Right's main "platforms" is less government, what would you guys have said if Obama launched a huge Federal initiative and assistance( ie...BIG money) the day, week after this had happened? Wouldn't you have screamed "Why are my tax dollars going to help clean up BP's mess?" I can't believe you would have supported Govt involvement when it was obviously someone's else's fault. To compare Katrina, a natural disaster, to a BP responsible explosion is night and day. Plus, the levee that broke in NO was a Federal structure, wasn't it? No part of the BP initiative, other than the $71,000 given by their employees I guess:rolleyes:, was their responsibility. So where..in a situation like this, with 100% culpable blame assigned to a company, do Reublicans draw the line between Govt involvement and less Govt is better? It just goes back to what I feel..everyone wants the Govt out of their lives until they need the Govt in their lives.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flood_Control_Act_of_1965
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/89th_Un...tates_Congress

Moar government!

Outsource and Privatize


at least we can blame someone then

It's obvious we can blame the democrats and republicans for making the already epic clusterf.uck known as the N.O. levees far worse with their half-assed Flood Control Act which to the day of the flood wasn't fixed. 40 years and the levees still weren't fixed.

Maybe we should sell New Orleans to the Dutch? They aren't retarded.