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PrintJune 16, 2010
What we didn't hear from Obama last night
After the address, even MSNBC chided their president for his lack of leadership and specifics on the oil spill. The speech seemed more like he was using the Gulf spill tragedy as a mere stepping stone for kooky Al-Gore-like energy policies. AGW Orwellianism was on full display.
What we didn't hear was his announcement of his decision to wave the 1920 Jones Act in order to allow other nations' state of the art oil cleanup ships to bring their forces to bear. Until now, he has obstructed this help because these ships are not manned by American union workers as required by the Jones Act.
What we didn't hear was his lifting all restrictions on red tape to allow all private enterprises now chomping at the bit to go in and clean up the damn oil.
What we didn't hear was a repeat of his recent statement of how only government can and should do certain things. He said it was not in the economic interest of private enterprise, for example, to build a road. So government had to step in and build it -- for the public good.
What we didn't hear, therefore, was his announcement that he is asking Congress for funding to build a massive state-of-the-art spill cleanup contingency infrastructure. He didn't say that the Exxon Valdez spill was a shot across the bow and that in the intervening years since, the Department of Energy dithered and that therefore government has failed us.
We didn't hear him admit that while American taxpayers have expended billions of dollars over the years since our last energy illiterate president established the DOE, bureaucracies are not there to solve problems, they are there to maintain them -- to insure full employment of the bureaucrats.
We didn't hear him tell us that since the Chinese, Vietnamese and others have joined Cuba in drilling off the coast of Florida, that he is reversing his six month moratorium on deep water gulf drilling. He didn't admit that this foolish moratorium would cost many thousands of jobs -- not just of the oil rig workers but of the supply ships, caterers, helicopter ferries, drilling equipment suppliers and many others. Nor that these multimillion dollar rigs would pull up and go elsewhere and never return.
He didn't admit that it was hypocritical to have his administration provide billions of dollars to Brazil to drill in deep water to develop their own offshore reserves while stifling our own. Nor admit that this was because George Soros had a vested interest in the Brazil drilling.
Lastly, we didn't hear him propose tax credits to develop our nation's 400 year supply of natural gas, or at least take the government boot off the neck of the domestic oil and gas industry.
But then that would solve a problem, and we now know this progressive government has no intention of solving problems -- only of exacerbating them to accrue power under the pretense of solving them. This is something we will not hear.
