Obama Twofer

Classic Obama

When people asked for a single payer health plan Obama gave us mandatory purchase of health insurance. When people ask for an international probe into the brutal murders of civilians attempting to breach Israel’s blockade of Gaza Obama tells us the probe will focus on the aid workers, the victims.

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11 days ago when the world was still reeling from the attack on the civilian aid ship, President Obama had made vague calls to reserve judgment until an international probe into the killings could take place. By this week, he was already making it clear that he was going to make sure that such a probe would not question the Israeli killings at all, but would instead focus on digging up dirt about the aid workers.

Classic Obama!

Oily Little Man

Obama may be tall and elegant but inside he’s just an oily little man. The unmitigated lies coming from Obama’s administration are gushing out even faster than the oil from Deep Horizon which may become known as “Obama’s Bane” instead, but not if Obama can lie his way out of it! According to McClatchy Obama uttered the following:

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"Oil rigs today generally don't cause spills," he added two days later. "They are technologically very advanced. Even during Katrina, the spills didn't come from the oil rigs, they came from the refineries onshore."

And then this from those ever famous unnamed and unknown, you guessed it, Obama administration officials (White House cook, groundskeeper, gardener?):

Top Obama administration officials say that they did an exhaustive job marshaling information for more than a year, and that the president asked what he needed to ask when it arrived at his desk. Anyone, they said, would grow complacent about the safety of offshore drilling after decades without a major spill.

"It's really important to understand you have decades of nothing going wrong," said one senior administration official, who spoke only on the condition of anonymity as a matter of White House policy.

"The last time you saw a spill of this magnitude in the Gulf, it was off the coast of Mexico in 1979," a second senior administration official said. "If something doesn't happen since 1979, you begin to take your eye off of that thing.”

Actually, what’s important to understand is that everything in the above two quotes is a bald faced lie. Despite what Obama and Obama’s top barber tell us, there have been 18 blow outs in the Gulf of Mexico since 1983.

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The reality is that wherever there’s oil drilling, there’s spilling. U.S. Department of Interior figures reflect 3 million gallons of oil spilled from 1980 to 1999 in the U.S. outer continental shelf offshore drilling program. As to blowouts, there were 18 in wells in the Gulf of Mexico from 1983 up to the eruption at the Deepwater Horizon rig.

Well let’s do the math. Hmm, so that’s 18 blowouts minus zero blowouts equals 18 blowouts! Wow, that wasn’t so hard. I mean 18 minus zero equals 18, right? Am I right? Okay let’s go back to the McClatchy article:

"Where I was wrong was in my belief that the oil companies had their act together when it came to worst-case scenarios," he said. "Now, that wasn't based on just my blind acceptance of their statements. Oil drilling has been going on in the Gulf, including deep water, for quite some time. And the record of accidents like this we hadn't seen before."

He also laid some blame on the MMS.

"Prior to this accident happening, I think there was a lack of anticipating what the worst-case scenarios would be. And that's a problem," he said. "And part of that problem was lodged in MMS and the way that that agency was structured. That was the agency in charge of providing permitting and making decisions in terms of where drilling could take place, but also in charge of enforcing the safety provisions.”

It seems odd to me that after a year of claimed careful study of the issue that Obama never heard of the 18 blowouts in the Gulf of Mexico since 1983. That’s really hard to believe. In fact, I don’t believe it. The last paragraph is of special interest regarding how it was the responsibility of the MMS for providing permitting and making decisions in terms of where drilling could take place, but also in charge of enforcing the safety provisions when you consider the following:

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The Obama administration joined BP in quashing environmental challenges to Gulf drilling in 2009 legal actions by Ken Salazar, Obama’s Secretary of Interior. They asked the federal court of appeals in Washington, DC to overturn their decision that blocked new drilling in the Gulf of Mexico’s outer continental shelf, referring to the same area where the explosion later occurred.

The appeals court partially approved Salazar’s petition, with the condition that the administration produce an environmental impact study for Gulf of Mexico drilling operations. The Obama administration granted BP a “categorical exemption” from producing a legally required environmental impact study and approved its exploration plan for the location of the future spill.

Naturally you won’t find the above in the mainstream news media who covers for Obama even while pretending to harshly criticize him. A nifty trick that, criticize Obama on something “human” as in to err and nobody is aware of Obama’s duplicity in this matter. Honestly, I don’t know how a person with any scruples at all could say what Obama said and not puke all over their shoes.