May, 2010 archive

Michael Tomasky in the Guardian echoes what I said yesterday about there being no federal apparatus for taking over attempts to contain the BP’s wild well. (Note: His statement in the third paragraph of the excerpt is mistaken; there certainly have been other spills and accidents and even a blowout or two, but not in this scale):

This is different from the Katrina situation. There we had an agency, or a couple of them, whose precise jobs were to build the walls that would prevent that from happening, since everyone who studied the situation knew that New Orleans was a catastrophe waiting to happen, and to map the flood plane and set up the rescue systems to get people out of same.

In other words, with Katrina, we had a system in place to prevent it, and it failed. Here, we didn’t even have a system in place.

Why not? I don’t know the history, but I would guess that having such a system in place was deemed too expensive, and the risk of disaster too low. It is worth remembering that there are 15,000 extant offshore oil operations around the shores of the US, and there’s never been an accident until this one.

If we want such an agency, then fine, let’s spend the money and employ the manpower and buy the equipment necessary.

(snip)

That said, Obama has a failure here. It’s not as a manager but as, what shall I call it, emoter-in-chief, often more important. As he has in previous instances as president, he has failed in grasping and expressing the basic outrage of the average person.

As John Cole says (read the whole post),

I hear screams to “take over” the operations from BP. And do what? Is there some secret naval division that handles deep-sea drilling that we have not deployed? Does the government have some elite unit with better equipment than BP? I’m as pissed at them as anyone and want the government to make them pay for every penny of the clean-up, but I have to believe that all the people with experience fighting these things and all the equipment to deal with this sort of thing is already there with BP. And that if we “took over” from BP, it would still be the same people.

Certainly, there is reason for anger and there are nits to pick with Obama and the administration’s reaction, but this spill results from the incompetence of the drillers compounded by Bushie deregulation. Furthermore, any action must be within the law and within the possible.

We have just had an administration that disregarded the law and ignored the possible. We don’t need another.

Taking the anger out on Mr. Obama may satisfy emotionally–anger with a target always satisfies more than anger without one (that’s why wingnuts prefer to make personal attacks)–but it is blaming the crossing guard for being in the path of the runaway truck.

The last crossing guard caused the runaway. Blaming the new one may provide catharsis, but it doesn’t stop the truck.

Will Bunch:

. . . seeing the rights of corporations and looking past the individuals is what the modern conservative movement — libertarian or not — is largely all about.

Fox News.

Naftali Bendavid on criticism of the government’s response to BP’s wild well:

“People don’t want government to do anything at all until there’s a crisis, and then they want it to be doing everything.”

Some time ago, a fellow named George Fitzhugh wrote a book called Cannibals All, which purported to prove that black folks were suited only to be slaves. It was, by the standards of its time, a “scientific” and “intellectual” response to the abolitionist movement. It attempted to cast a cloak of rationality over chattel slavery. (Somewhere I have a copy; I bought it when I was doing grad work in Southern history. I’ve never worked up the nerve actually to read it.)

Such an argument is no longer socially permissible in American society.

So new arguments are necessary.

Rachel Maddow deconstructs how Libertarianism excuses racist behavior. It’s 11 minutes. It is worth every one of them.

Via the Richmonder, which points out

. . . the key distinction is between speech and conduct. If you want to say “I don’t like Black people,” then the 1st Amendment to the U.S Constitution protects your right to do so. But if you want to run a business that serves the public, you are out of luck: you can’t discriminate between who you serve based on race. Sorry, but that’s the deal: if you serve the public, then you have to serve the whole public.

Libertarianism addresses many more issues that racism, but its arguments that would excuse racist conduct expose it for what it is: intellectual three-card monte.

It is quite clever. So is three-card monte.

It is also, like three-card monte, dishonest.

I suspect that it deceives its proponents more than it deceives anyone else. It allows them to pretend to themselves that they are Deep Thinkers who Take Political Theory Seriously, when, in fact, they are traditional American rightwing whackjobs dressing their whackjobbery in Sunday go-to-meeting clothes.

Rand Paul has done a service by most unwilling and unwittingly demonstrating this.