Obama, Oil and The Deep Blue Sea

You have to feel sorry for anybody who sits in the White House. It’s a trap. You can’t go out for pizza; you can’t take a walk; you can’t put the place up for sale and move. Bush found that out when Katrina landed on him five years ago.
The City of New Orleans had spread out into lowlands that no one in his right mind would have built a house on during its first couple of centuries. But it had gotten crowded and poorer people had moved out where land was cheaper—and far less safe.
Whooooosh. Everything was gone. Somehow it became Washington’s job to move tens of thousands of people out of the way of a massive (and entirely predictable) natural disaster overnight—in moments. This while New Orleans police and rescue personnel were going AWOL in great numbers to rescue their own families, and mayor was holed up in the upper stories of a hotel.
Everybody hates Washington—until the floods come. Reminds one of Kipling’s poem dedicated to “Tommy” the soldier. Despise him, keep him away—“until the guns begin to shoot. Then it’s Tommy, savior of your country!” In this country, it’s why can’t Washington do the impossible—yesterday or even the day before.
Now it’s Obama’s turn. I watched on ABC News as Obama knelt down on a Louisiana beach and vowed to do something, to stay with you. And do what—send several million gallons of gushing oil into outer space?
Then the cameras switched to some civilians in diners and on the street. Did they believe him? The headshakes were eloquent. Of course they didn’t and, unless Obama is far less sane than I think he is, he didn’t believe himself.
What are you going to DO about millions of gallons of oil pouring out into water one mile straight down? Realistically? Kneel down and the beach, get some squishy, oily mud on your fingers and vow to hang in. No other real options.
Churchill made one of his heroic World War II speeches, knowing that the British Army basically didn’t have enough rifles for each soldier to have one. He had to kneel down on the beach and sound brave. “We will fight them on the beaches, we will fight them in the hills” and so forth.
Then he put his hand over the mike and muttered, “We will hit them over the head with beer bottles as they crawl ashore. That’s all we have left to work with”.
He didn’t have to reach a mile down to the ocean bottom in order to do it. (Roosevelt found a couple of million World War I rifles and rushed them to England.) Obama’s got a tougher problem to deal with. No one’s got a beer bottle with a long enough neck for an undersea oil spill.
As I say, everybody should pause a moment to feel sorry for a president, Democrat or Republican. You come to Washington trailing clouds of campaign glory. You are going to reform education, reform health care, end war, put the economy back on track—and the war goes on; people too selfish to join a pool to pay for universal health care prove intractable, and the economic problems are absolutely terrifying in their complexity.
Maybe he made the right calls, maybe he didn’t—but the fact is they are still shooting in Afghanistan and Iraq, and the consequences to us of a European collapse are unthinkable. Nothing is truly cured. Our biggest curse—total dependence on Arab enemies for our fuel—seems unsolvable. So he tries to drill for more (just like Bush) … .
Pop goes the whole rig, pipe and oil deposit. A whole mile down. One more disaster to solve—with beer bottles; it’s all he’s got to work with.