The Hubris Spill
[UPDATE, 6/28/2010: A fascinating article in the Weekly Standard describes the intimate connection between British Petroleum and the Obama administration, as well as the company’s long history of advocacy on behalf of the Green movement. Hat tip: View From the Right.]
After two months of dithering in the face of one of the greatest ecological disasters in recent history, B. Hussein Obama last week deigned to formally address his subjects on the matter. The speech represented a new summit of the arrogant, community-organizer, false-credential, Chicago-thug style to which we have become accustomed. So nauseating was the performance that even some of his lapdogs in the establishment press—such as Chris Matthews and Keith Olbermann—in a fit of temporary insanity forgot that they were referring to His Royal Eminence The First Black President. The dobermans turned on their master, unleashing a torrent of criticism that would have prompted cries of “racism” to emerge from their vocal chords, had the same words emanated from a spokesman of the Vast Right-Wing Conspiracy.
There has been speculation aplenty in the blogosphere regarding the driving force behind B. Hussein’s behavior during the entire oil-spill crisis. Is his dithering and ineptitude simply an element of the Left’s efforts to bring America to its knees? Is this an instance of “never let a crisis go to waste” on a grand scale? A pretext for nationalizing the oil companies? For passing the Cap & Trade monstrosity? Or are we looking at pure incompetence?
Surely the answer incorporates all of these elements. Rather than try to pinpoint the relative weights, I will simply add more fuel to the fire by focusing on one aspect of the leftist psyche that comes into play in situations like this: The profound divorce from reality; from the actual, real-life, everyday functioning of the world.
The leftist is wed to his ideology. This subservience molds and conditions his every thought, action, and verbal expression. Any problem or challenge must be assigned an oppressor and matching victim, so that blame and punishment can follow. There are no chance occurrences in this fantasy world; in his eyes, every debacle is the result of nefarious planning, or, more to the point, of a conspiracy.
In the realm of energy, the bad guys are the oil companies, Western consumers, and, ultimately, the human race. This is the prism through which any oil-related event is viewed. There are no nuances; no such thing as better or worse oil companies, better or worse government regulation, or better or worse locations and conditions for drilling. And certainly no such thing as human error on the part of the purported enemy.
This means that when a disaster such as the Gulf oil spill occurs, the leftist has no mental template in which he can process the flow of information and formulate a coherent, rational response. In other words, he lacks the intellectual tools needed to solve a concrete problem.
The desperately-needed response from day one boiled down to plugging the hole. That is the sum total of the presidential challenge at the moment of crisis. Sorry, no need for victims, bad guys, commissions, Nobel prizes, czars, or condemnations of “corporate greed.” All of that can come later, when the emergency has passed, and it can be managed by others. Also at a later date we can deal with national energy strategy and corrections in regulatory policy. The president’s job: plug the damn hole.
The irony screams to the heavens: Our leader belongs to the party with Green written all over it. The people who saturate us 24/7 with environmental hysteria cannot protect us from real harm. These are the people who know full well how to don sackcloth and ashes and shriek their jeremiads about New York being underwater; who feel no compunction about introducing legislation certain to cripple the already-floundering economy in order to eliminate some imaginary threat to the health of the planet. They know how to fly battalions of bureaucrats to Copenhagen to bloviate over their beloved Global Warming, to moan about polar bears and ice caps, but when it comes to real humans watching their environment and livelihood go down the drain, well, it’s their fault anyway, for having such big cars.
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June 23rd, 2010 at 3:13 pm
Gary, you made some very good points about Obama’s strange and inappropriate reactions to the oil spill. His inability to solve a concrete problem.
Obama and the left are divorced from reality. They are using any disaster to gain power and are not interested in actually solving the problem.
Even if the left gets all the power they want they will still need energy, food and building materials. Where do they think it all comes from? Don’t they know that their own families will eventually suffer along with the rest of us?
This is getting to be very weird.
June 25th, 2010 at 4:51 pm
I’m not sure how much of the bad performance can be blamed on ideology rather than sheer stupidity. That is, is it not possible to imagine someone with a leftist bent having the technical knowhow to act effectively? I think that this problem deserves more of your attention.
June 30th, 2010 at 7:01 am
Elizabeth: You bring up a good point. How is such a suspension of common sense possible? One explanation, at least in the American/W. European context, is that people have been too wealthy and comfortable for too long. They consider the normal functioning of society to be something permanent, like the rising of the sun every morning. They are ignorant of the vast foundation of ethics, laws, and traditions that allow a dozen eggs from a distant farm to magically appear in a local supermarket.
Similarly, the naïve variety of leftist has no conception of a society in which this foundation collapses or is severely ruptured. But this unfortunate education is now arriving, piece by piece. Let’s hope that enough people are jarred into a waking state by the chaos that already is encroaching on our lives (Arizona being a prime example).
The problem is exacerbated by the fact that so many leftists work in domains that are divorced from real industry and concrete problem-solving: social work, the arts, education, “Diversity,” this and that government bureaucracy, etc.
Ken: Absolutely, someone with a leftist bent could possess the necessary skills. If I understand you correctly, you are saying that people in the Obama administration could have solved the problem if they had desired such an outcome. Yes, this is a factor, as I indicated in the second paragraph of the post. It is part of a recurring pattern, both historically and for our current leftist overlords. One could say that if the oil spill crisis didn’t exist, it would have to be invented.
Similarly for the debt crisis. It is clear that it is manufactured with malice aforethought. The goal is to destroy the hated capitalist economy, and lay the groundwork for seizure of power in one realm after another.