| |
OBAMA'S BIG OIL SPILL BUNGLE
By DICK MORRIS
TheHill.com
It's one thing to say that Obama's administration
showed ineptitude and mismanagement in its handling of the Gulf oil spill.
It is quite another to grasp the situation up close, as I did during a
recent visit to Alabama.
According to state disaster relief
officials, Alabama conceived a plan -- early on -- to erect huge booms
offshore to shield the approximately 200 miles of the state's coastline from
oil. Rather than install the relatively light and shallow booms in use
elsewhere, the state (with assistance from the Coast Guard) canvassed the
world and located enough huge, heavy booms -- some weighing tons and seven
meters high -- to guard their coast.
But...no sooner were the booms
in place than the Coast Guard, perhaps under pressure from the public
comments of James Carville, uprooted them and moved them to guard the
Louisiana coastline instead.
So Alabama decided on a backup plan. It
would buy snare booms to catch the oil as it began to wash up on the
beaches.
But...the Fish and Wildlife Administration vetoed the plan,
saying it would endanger sea turtles that nest on the beaches.
So
Alabama -- ever resourceful -- decided to hire 400 workers to patrol the
beaches in person, scooping up oil that had washed ashore.
But...OSHA
(the Occupational Safety and Health Administration) refused to allow them to
work more than 20 minutes out of every hour and required an hourlong break
after 40 minutes of work, so the cleanup proceeded at a very slow pace.
The short answer is that every agency -- each with its own particular
bureaucratic agenda -- was able to veto each aspect of any plan to fight the
spill, with the unintended consequence that nothing stopped the oil from
destroying hundreds of miles of wetlands, habitats, beaches, fisheries and
recreational facilities.
Where was the president? Why did he not
intervene in these and countless other bureaucratic controversies to force a
focus on the oil, not on the turtles and other incidental concerns?
According to Alabama Gov. Bob Riley, the administration's "lack of ability
has become transparent" in its handling of the oil spill. He notes that one
stellar exception has been Obama aide Valerie Jarrett, without whom, he
says, nothing whatever would have gotten done.
Eventually, the state
stopped listening to federal agencies and just has gone ahead and given
funds directly to the local folks fighting the spill rather than paying
attention to the directives of the Unified Command. Apparently, there is a
world of difference between the competence of the Coast Guard and the superb
and efficient regular Navy and military.
Now the greatest crisis of
all looms on the horizon as hurricanes sweep into the Gulf. Should one hit
offshore, it will destroy all the booms that have been placed to stop the
oil from reaching shore. And there are no more booms anywhere in the world,
according to Alabama disaster relief officials. "There is no more inventory
of booms anywhere on earth," one told me in despair.
The political
impact of this incompetence has only just begun to be felt. While
administration operatives are flying high after a week in which the
president's ratings rebounded to 49 percent, per Rasmussen, after his firing
of Gen. Stanley McChrystal, the oil is still gushing and the situation is
about to worsen.
The obvious fact is that Obama has no executive
experience, nor do any of his top advisers. Without a clear mandate from the
top, needed efforts to salvage the situation are repeatedly stymied by
well-meaning bureaucrats strictly following the letter of their agency
policy and federal law. The result, ironically, of their determined efforts
to protect the environment has been the greatest environmental disaster in
history. But some turtles are OK!