Sarah Palin, who popularized the "drill, baby, drill" slogan as the GOP vice presidential candidate, criticized President Obama's efforts to clean up the Gulf oil spill.
The former Alaska governor, speaking on "Fox News Sunday," questioned whether there's "any connection" between Obama's campaign donations from oil companies and him "taking so doggone long to get in there, to dive in there, and grasp the complexity and the potential tragedy that we are seeing here in the Gulf of Mexico," the Los Angeles Times reports.
Palin said she remains a "big supporter" of oil drilling but "these oil companies have got to be held accountable."
First, a small digression: Obama accepted $900,000 in donations from Big Oil. Palin accepted $2.8 million. So if she's pointing that finger, then maybe she ought to realize that precisely three more of her own fingers are pointing right back at her.
Next, if you choose to believe in the freedom of an oil company to explore and drill for oil with minimal government oversight, as her former President George W. Bush believed AND as Sarah Palin obviously believes, then you have to also believe, hand in hand with this idea, that when the shit hits the fan, it's up to the corporation you've allowed to rape the environment to clean it up themselves, without governmental assistance.
You can't privatize profits and socialize costs, in other words.
Sarah Palin is running scared, desperately scared, to the Nanny Statist position in order to distance herself from her own whorish attitudes.
Accidents happen. The problem is, there's a big difference between me falling over a turned-up carpet in my home and a large, wealthy (there's the keyword here) multinational petroleum producing country, one especially that has attached itself so closely with trying to be "green" (Beyond Petroleum, indeed!) admitting it was underqualified to attempt such a well in the first place, as it had zero experience with a spill at those depths.
That's not an accident, that's criminal negligence! It's a little like letting your kid have the car to drive to the mall, and finding out later he crashed it into a building 1,000 miles away. There's a deliberate, almost malicious, hubris involved.
The economy of the Gulf, so badly battered by Hurricane Katrina, and so crippled by the recent housing bubble burst, is now officially dead. There is no coming back from this. Homes that cost a million dollars or even a hundred thousand dollars just six years ago will be worth pennies on the dollar. Tourism, dead. Fishing, dead for the foreseeable future. The wetlands that protect the coast from hurricanes will not recover in time for the hurricane season, creating enormous devastation if even a small hurricane or tropical storm slams into that coast.
If you're going to focus on governmental responsibility, focus on the "oil men" who ran this country for the past decade or so, the ones who rubber stamped nearly every drill permit request.
The idiots who somehow believed that drilling in the Gulf would demonstrably lower the prices of oil in the United States. The same idiots who either somehow blindly missed the truth of commodity markets-- that all crude goes onto the exchange, unless you nationalize the oil industry like Venezuela has, which is socialist, and skim your needs first, then try to sell the rest on the markets-- or decided to hoodwink the entire nation, especially the low-normals of the Republican party who swallowed their shit, hook line and sinker.
The fuckheads who approved this license for BP. Those are the people you should be pointing fingers at. They ought to be strung up.
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