compounding idiocy

On the one hand, courtesy of John Lott, we find that Our Glorious President’s ratings in handling the Gulf oil spill are worse than President Bush’s handling of Katrina:

A month and a half after the spill began, 69 percent in a new ABC News/Washington Post poll rate the federal response negatively. That compares with a 62 negative rating for the response to Katrina two weeks after the August 2005 hurricane.

It is not exactly fair to compare against different timelines, but the numbers are still all too amusing. Could those numbers be the result of pointless posturing rather than actually doing his job? Or maybe people have started noticing Our Glorious President’s tendency of using golf to avoid the pressing issues?

Unfortunately, I am fairly certain that people are not dissatisified with his performance due to his engaging in activities that are not within the scope of his job, but maybe, just maybe, that day will come.

On the other hand, we have narrow-minded, emotional “liberals” not knowing what they ask for:

If we can take over a freaking car company than by God we can revoke BP America’s corporate charter or whatever you call it and give this corporate citizen the death sentence to make sure the people and wildlife of the Gulf don’t have to wait 26 years for their justice.

If I were in a position to be making those kinds of decisions for BP, I would almost be inclined to give ignorant idiots like Soutern Beale exactly what they are asking for – complete and utter withdrawl of British Petroleum from the United States. No more refineries. No more oil rigs. No more drilling. No more gasoline.

After all, who would notice the 22,000,000,000 gallons of gasoline that BP provides America just up and vanishing? That is just a drop in the bucket, right? We Americans just chug that gas, do we not?

In point of fact, we consume 137,800,000,000 gallons of gas a year, resulting in BP accounting for around 16% of our fuel supply.

I wonder how “liberals” like SoBeale would feel about gas prices going up 200%+? Or, better yet, how they would feel about gas stations being closed one day out of the week, thanks to insufficient supplies to meet demands? Or the cost of every single product that is transported by road (somewhere around 3/4s of the products on your neighborhood’s stores’ shelves) increasing by 200%+? [Editor's Note: Those percentages were originally 20%, but Reputo accurately pointed out that price increases from reductions in supply are not linear.]

As usual, “liberals” are incapable of thinking past their own all-consuming emotions.

Yes, this disaster is just that – a disaster of massive proportions. Yes, it is going to take a very long time to clean up. And, yes, if there is any indication of misconduct, malpractice, or incompetence, then the people responsible for those shortcomings should be held accountable to the fullest extent of the law.

… Including Our Glorious President for maliciously dragging his feet, and for being at the head of the administration that allowed oversight and examination of these oil rigs to slide to apparently unacceptable levels. So how about it, “liberals“? You can hoist up the folks at BP just as soon as we can hoist up everyone responsible in the Obama administration, starting from the Narcissist in Chief on down.

Yeah. I can just imagine the frothing-at-the-mouth over that suggestion.

The fact is, our world needs oil-based products at the moment, and irrationally demanding that our dependence on oil simply vanishes overnight (as SoBeale actually has done – Google her weblog and look for yourself, I will not link to it) simply will not work. So, we need to drill for that oil. And thanks to environmental restrictions and governmental incentives, deep-water drilling was the most-legal, most-profitable, and most-dangerous option available to oil companies… and they decided that satiating the greenie-weenies and making a buck on the side from our government offset the potential danger.

A bad choice? Well, when combined with piss-poor oversight from the appropriate authorities, a system failure, and a lack of proper protective equipment, looks like. But does one sequence of bad choices, more than a few government agencies and representatives falling down on their respective jobs, and one hell of a bad string of luck give the government the sudden ability to simply socialize a private company for the gos-se and giggles of it?

Hell frakking no.

And our government, and those who would encourage it to try and hijack a private corporation, would do well to remember that this is not an American company, they can pull out and leave us high and dry should they so desire (and, in fact, they should, if the government turns out to be stupid enough to try that kind of bulldren), and that will cost every single American citizen a not-insignificant amount of money. And will it plug the hole in the Gulf?

Yeah. Not exactly.

But rational thought has never exactly been the strong point of individuals who allow themselves to be ruled by their emotions and fears.