Morning Jolt
. . . with Jim Geraghty
May 25, 2010
In This Issue . . .
1. We Know the White House Isn't Burning the Midnight Oil
2. Another Alienating Sedition Hack
3. Addenda
Enjoy your Tuesday Jolt!
Jim
1. We Know the White House Isn't Burning the Midnight Oil
Yesterday, I caught a bit of Chris Matthews interviewing David Axelrod about the Gulf oil spill, and while Matthews continues to pursue his duties with the hard-nosed sobriety we've come to associate with Dean Martin, give him a few points for consistency; he seemed to be hyperventilating almost as intensely at Obama's top adviser as he would at, say, Karl Rove. His next guest was one of the lawyers preparing to represent Gulf Coast workers, and the ambulance tanker-chaser ripped into Axelrod and the administration for not emulating Huey Long. (What, does he want witch trials?)
Anyway, even in the comfortable confines of MSNBC, there's a creeping realization among liberals that the president they deemed the ideal has encountered his own massive crisis on the Gulf Coast, and a month later, we're still waiting for a solution. We're not waiting for them to implement the solution; we're still waiting for an idea that is certain to work. Apparently, there's a chance that this hole won't stop spewing until the pressure down there and the pressure up here are roughly equal -- months, perhaps.
Radio Equalizer Brian Maloney notices the same trend, quoting Ed Schultz: "Mr. President, I'm a huge fan, but this is now your oil spill. It's on your watch. We need to come up with some kind of huge plan on what we're going to do, because we've spent thirty days waiting for BP, waiting for Transocean, who've done a great job of just washing their hands of all of this. Let me just say this, Washington: It's time to get it on. It's time to get real serious about this."
I'm no engineer, but I'm rather struck that we can build something that can drill so deep, so far from land, and yet not have a good way to shut the darn thing off if something goes wrong, not even if we give some of the best minds in the subject a month and a ton of cash. The footage of the Gulf coast is horrifying, those helpless sea birds heartbreaking, and around the ten-thousandth time that Axelrod reminds you that Energy Secretary Steven Chu won the Nobel Prize, you start wondering, "Hey, if we took his and Obama's Nobels and stuck 'em together, any chance they would make a decent plug for that hole?"
For starters, despite Obama's "We will do this" pronouncements, it appears the federal bureaucracy has tuned him out: "In the days since President Obama announced a moratorium on permits for drilling new offshore oil wells and a halt to a controversial type of environmental waiver that was given to the Deepwater Horizon rig, at least seven new permits for various types of drilling and five environmental waivers have been granted, according to records."
My questions are similar to those of Ace of Spades: "A big question I have is why wasn't there, already present in the Gulf, the equipment needed to contain or plug a leaking well? Why are we so far behind, scrambling, after the disaster has been ongoing for 33 days? Please don't call me a socialist when I say that if a company is engaging in an inherently dangerous activity, there should be laws requiring them to have the equipment necessary to contain a disaster. Sure, you can demolish a building through explosive force if needed -- but you have to pay the Fire Department and EMTs to have personnel on site. You can't just trust that you placed your charges properly. A disaster will happen; they always do. This is just a fact of life. What makes it criminal is that there was no back-up plan ready to roll. Apparently Plan A for this was 'the well will not explode.' Period. End of sentence, end of file. There was no Plan B in case it did explode because . . . see Plan A:The well will not explode. How many times do I have to tell you? There will not be a disaster -- that's our plan for containing a disaster."
At Hot Air, Allahpundit tries to figure out why the Obama White House seems so lethargic in its response: "The only explanation I can come up with is that, like all presidents, there are certain policy areas that The One is really interested in (e.g., health care) and certain others that he pretty clearly doesn't care much about and will deal with by doing whatever's politically expedient (e.g., gay marriage). This seems to be a category two issue. He's largely indifferent towards drilling, I suspect, but decided to support it as a compromise in hopes of winning some GOP votes on the energy bill and figured that it would soon go away. Oops. Well, look on the bright side: If nothing else good comes from this disaster, at least now we have a roughly quantifiable sense of how long it takes for media outrage to build towards Obama versus towards Bush. Figure Dubya would have been under fire for dragging his feet on the spill after, what -- maybe three days? It's now 34 days since BP's rig exploded and only yesterday did frustration really start bubbling on the Sunday chat shows."
Hugh Hewitt sees this as one of those moments that reveals the kind of president that Barack Obama is: "Governor Jindal wants to dredge and build barrier islands to stop the oil from reaching the Louisiana coastline and its sensitive wetlands and beaches. President Obama's team won't give permission. Thus President Obama is blocking a key -- and obvious -- containment strategy. The damage that follows from actions not taken is the president's responsibility. . . . Why would anyone not try everything that was reasonable? The president's timidity comes from his fear that he will be held accountable for a failure to stop the disaster -- that this will become his Katrina. It already is, except that President Bush stepped up only two days after the locals failed to execute their evacuation plans. Here the crisis has been a federal responsibility from day one minute one and the president has watched and hoped that BP would figure something out. And just so you don't think that the president and his team deserve at least a day or two to evaluate the idea, consider the application for dredging was filed on May 11!"
2. Another Alienating Sedition Hack
Hey, look who's trolling for donations from angry liberals: "Governor Deval Patrick, even as he decried partisanship in Washington, said today that Republican opposition to President Obama's agenda has become so obstinate that it 'is almost at the level of sedition.'"
How appropriate, coming from a group of lawmakers who operate almost at the level of autocracy.
Who does he think he is, Joe Klein? To quote an earlier Jolt:
Newsbusters informs us: "On NBC's April 18 'The Chris Matthews Show,' Time columnist Joe Klein all but accused former GOP vice-presidential nominee and Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin, along with Fox News host Glenn Beck of sedition. 'I did a little bit of research just before this show -- it's on this little napkin here. I looked up the definition of sedition which is conduct or language inciting rebellion against the authority of the state. And a lot of these statements, especially the ones coming from people like Glenn Beck and to a certain extent Sarah Palin, rub right up close to being seditious.'"
Credit the lefties for thinking green; now they're recycling their smears.
Erick Erickson fires upon this fish in this barrel: "Patrick's larger point, that people like me are engaging in sedition, the Democrats for eight years said dissent was patriotic. Now they don't believe that. The Democrats, after eight years of working to undermine George Bush and weaken us, are incapable of separating acts of political rebellion at the ballot box from acts of physical rebellions against the state. Unlike Louis XIV, Barack Obama is not the state. And it is no one's goal to physically rebel against either Obama or the government. But it is certainly my goal to beat the mess out of him at the ballot box."
This is the straw that broke the back of Glenn Reynolds' trademark one-liner: "They told me if I voted for . . . Oh, hell, this is getting too easy."
3. Addenda
I realize this was an oil-heavy edition of the Jolt, but I have a feeling this is going to start dominating the news cycle. There's an incredulity that this is still going on, more than a month later. . . .
I thought the 24 series finale was an almost-good ending to a quite solid final season. (SPOILER ALERT.) It was tense and taut all the way until, oh, when Jack bit the ear off Logan's right-hand man. The problem is, this left Jack on a gurney for most of the remainder of the episode, making the climax President Taylor's moral epiphany. This had been a fine B-plot; the creators did a great job of showing her slow seduction by Logan's Iago-like moral compromises; a key line of dialogue came from the secretary of state when he noted that Taylor had lost everything -- her husband, her children -- in pursuit of the presidency, and it had left her with an ethical blind spot when it came to preserving the treaty with Iran the Islamic Republic of Kamistan. But this is the series finale, folks. Cherry Jones's emoting is fine, but it's surprisingly quiet for the last half-hour we'll ever get to spend in the tense, action-packed world of 24. And the consequences for the Russian president -- who our hero was ready to shoot a half-hour ago -- seem quite undefined.
No, the problem was the very final few minutes, where we're watching some no-name, anonymous rent-a-goons prepare to execute Jack; he attempts to escape, fails . . . and gets saved by a phone call. Yes, I know Chloe and Arlo were tech-savvy geniuses to get the phone call through. But techno-babble is the last thing the final minutes of 24 needed. And then our story ends with Jack as a fugitive . . . yet again, a repeat of more than one season's final note and way too downbeat a final scene for the series. Jack deserved more than a teary apology from the president and a weepy goodbye to sidekick Chloe. He deserved to move near Kim, to teach at CTU Academy, to be a guest lecturer at the David Palmer Presidential Library.
Oh, well. At least Jack didn't end up on some mysterious island. |
