From Pine View Farm

Too Many Garbage Cans 0

Republicans screwed up government so bad that I cannot blame the current administration for failing to fix everything at once. Depressed and saddened, yes. Angry at the government, no.

There are so many garbage cans to carry to the curb and only so many pairs of hands to carry them.

Dick Polman is not so charitable as I.

All told, MMS had fostered “a culture of substance abuse and promiscuity” – all this, at a time when MMS regulators, in three reviews, repeatedly minimized the prospects for an environmental disaster in the Gulf of Mexico. Actually, it was worse than that. Under federal law, offshore oil drillers are supposed to map out strategies for reducing their environmental impact – but MMS, during that three-year period, waived the federal rules for Gulf of Mexico projects roughly 750 times.

Let us note that the years covered in these reports – 2005 to 2007 – happened to coincide with the second term of the Bush administration. This should hardly come as a shock. Hewing to its conservative principles, the regime was infamous for the ways in which it demonstrated contempt for governance, and the MMS behavior was contempt on steroids. Fittingly, the guy who directed the MMS Gulf of Mexico office was awarded with a big promotion in 2007.

But it’s a waste of time to heap full blame on the Bush team, because those people didn’t know any better. It was hardwired in their DNA to celebrate the presumed glories of unrestrained market freedom; in the party’s ’08 parlance, “Drill, Baby, Drill.” The Obama administration, on the other hand, was supposed to be different. The new brooms were brought to town for the express purpose of erasing the Bush stench and reestablishing the principle that responsible governance is actually a good thing.

MMS=Make Mine Spillage.

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