Inconceivable

BP, the oil company whose well is spewing 200,000 gallons of oil daily into the the Gulf of Mexico, wants us to know about its excellent safety record. Well, let me tell you right now, I'm impressed. With the catastrophic oil spill growing more catastrophic by the hour, I'm sure that a lot of other people will, like me, be heartened to know that BP has an excellent record of not despoiling the planet with spilled crude oil. The company now hopes to drop a massive cap 74-ton concrete and steel over the broken pipe 5,000 feet under the water and suck the oil out of it into a tanker on the surface. Nobody knows if this will work. And it will take about a eight days to try. It may be as futile as the up-till-now futile attempt to get the "blow-out preventer" mechanism to function as designed. This is the culprit that caused the whole mess (a word that utterly fails to convey how terrible this event is). According to a BP spokesman, it seemed "inconceivable" that this mechanism would fail.

Now, I ask you, do we really need people like Sarah Palin and Bill Kristol running around in the midst of this crisis toting the virtues of the oil industry? Palin is on record this weekend as saying that though the spill is "very tragic, . . . I want our country to be able to trust the oil industry." Bill Kristol, that knee-jerk shill for all things right wing, says that drilling closer to the shore would be better. Oh, this unpleasantness in the Gulf is a bad thing, but . . .


"If we hadn't stopped closer-in drilling after the Santa Barbara accident 40 years ago -- we've had these Congressional restrictions until 2008, for 40 years -- we'd have more drilling closer in which is probably less dangerous, less treacherous than trying to drill 50 miles out from the coast," Kristol explained.

Got that? If the government had not imposed these restrictions, things like this would not be happening.

In the meantime, they picking up dead sea turtles off the beaches in Pass Christian, Mississippi.