It's understandable when people feel the need to defend Obama for not doing enough to stop the oil leak in the Gulf. I'm certain he's doing everything in his power to get this catastrophe fixed. I understand that a lot of frustrated people are demanding that he do more, NOW! And I understand that a lot of just as frustrated people are feeling like, hey, the guy's doing all he can do as fast as he can do it.
All of that is understandable.
What's not understandable, what's really at the heart of the matter here to begin with, is the issue of what the hell were they doing to begin with?
But after Ken Salazar personally intervened in federal court to overturn an injunction against offshore drilling, specifically for the catastrophic well at Mississippi Canyon Block 252...
Democrats just grinned their usual shit-eating grins, and blamed everybody else except Barack Obama.
And that's the real story.
Obama/Salazar intervened last year to allow BP to drill at Mississippi Canyon Block 252, where tens of millions of gallons of oil are now polluting the Gulf of Mexico.
The actual exploratory drilling was approved by the Obama administration on April 6, 2009.
Within days of the 2009 approval, the Center for Biological Diversity and its allies won a court order vacating the Bush Five-Year Offshore Drilling Plan. Rather than use the court order as a timeout on new offshore oil drilling to develop a new plan, Interior Secretary Ken Salazar filed a special motion with the court to exempt approved oil drilling in the Gulf of Mexico. He specifically identified BP's operation as one that should be released from the vacature.
So the system actually worked, and offshore drilling had been shut down around Alaska and in the Gulf of Mexico by the DC Circuit Court of Appeals, but then...
Obama/Salazar intervened in court to start drilling again, in April 2009, without further evironmental review, exactly where Deepwater Horizon exploded and sank.
That's the real issue here. Obama had a chance to change the direction this nation took in offshore oil drilling. Instead, he intervened against the enviromentalists on behalf of the oil industry and we have the disaster we have today.
He should have listened to the left to begin with. Not one of us takes any joy in saying "we told you so."
Had we elected a president who was a true progressive, this would not have happened. So despite all the other crises Obama has to attend to, in the end, it's not the slow pace of stopping the oil leak that is Obama's fault, it's the fact the oil leak even happened at all that lies directly upon his shoulders.
