Reaping the benefits of "drill baby drill" with Mr. Hope and Change

Just a few weeks ago, our fraudulent asshole president (the latest in a series of wholly corporate-owned turds masquerading as leaders) stood in front of a fighter jet on a military base and backed the Sarah Palin "drill baby drill" mantra as a national energy policy. This was no surprise to me as it is and was self-evident that Obama/Biden was in no way different than McCain/Palin on any issue of import, save for the bizarre fact that self-described "liberals" agree with a position when a Democrat takes it up and are critical of the same position on the same issue when a Republican takes it up, which is about 95% of the time.Those of us who held out hope for doing better and voted for Ralph Nader, Cynthia McKinney, the Libertarians, Ron Paul or so forth were duly lectured less than 2 years ago for our irresponsibility in not backing the Obama Wall Street/corporate/war machine. My wilder fantasies include Obama voters being organized to mop up the Gulf Coast with "Yes We Can!" T-shirts - their first practical usage ever (both the shirts and the voters themselves) - but I ask for too much.

Any self-respecting "liberal" should have serious concerns about an energy policy written by corporate lobbyists, cheerleaded by a president beholden to rapacious corporate America and presented in front of an instrument of war currently being used to kill people on the other side of the planet in order to secure access to their energy reserves. As Democratic voters gave up self-respect decades ago no such audible complaint was registered. "Yes we can!"

UPDATE: Obama was the #1 recipient of British Petroleum money in the US Senate in 2008, receiving twice as much money from them as John McCain (which is not, you understand, a point in McCain's favor).

Obama was opening up most of the Atlantic seaboard - oil clumps at Wildwood, party on! - as well as even larger areas of the Gulf of Mexico and Alaskan coast to this sort of deep-sea offshore drilling which is essentially impossible to do in any environmentally responsible way. Environmentally responsible is actually something of an understatement; it's impossible to do this crap in any way which isn't sociopathic.

The only small satisfaction that comes from this unmitigated disaster - entirely possibly the worst single-incident disaster of its sort in US history - is that it might slow down or even, if people act up and fight back for a change, halt - the Bush/Cheney/Obama/Biden/Palin plans to do even more offshore drilling off most of the American coast. Hopefully too people might slowly wake to see, as if his positions on war and human rights and the health insurance industry and the Wall Street bailout and even frightening recent comments on the Warren and Burger courts didn't make it obvious enough - what a complete and total corporate whore and warmonger jackass Obama is. He's not your buddy. He doesn't share your dreams. He shits on your rights and opinions. He's a bitch boy for Goldman Sachs, landmine manufacturers and British Petroleum.

Instead of pumping major money and laws into clean renewables such as wind and solar, Obama heeds his corporate masters' voice and drills baby drills. He is also using billions in taxpayer funds to reanimate the uninsurable corporate disasters waiting to happen that are the nuke industry. It's as if Chernobyl and Three Mile Island never happened.


Still don't think Barry O's a jackass? How about his Cheney-like support of (ahem) "clean coal."

Beyond the irreparable wildlife deaths and ruination of our common property in the form of national preserves, this disaster is going to wipe out livelihoods and tax revenues in large parts of four US states. BP will never be held accountable for all that entails, not with the two corporate parties in charge. (My simple solution to this on the economic side is the corporate death penalty; freeze the assets of BP in the US, nationalize them to pay for whatever necessarily insufficient clean up happens and as reparations for Gulf Coast residents... and pull its corporate charters so they can't kill again.) Fortunately it is possible that as vacations and fishing trips are cancelled, as seafood markets are ruined and unemployment claims increase, the drill baby drill politicians can and must be taken the fuck down this year and in 2012. Don't buy any BS about a 30 day review in order to start drilling off of our coasts "responsibly."

Obama now has his own Hurricane Katrina-times-ten. Well deserved by him, not at all deserved by its victims. How refreshing that as the crude oil sullies the southern United States it also finally begins to sully the empty Obama marketing myth. Who will be our next Kanye West for this disaster, finally declaring in public in plain language that "Barack Obama doesn't care about working people"?