Urgent Priorities and Common Sense in the Gulf

June 24th, 2010 5:40 PM

The ramifications of the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico have not even begun to surface. We will be dealing with the ecological damage for years as the prime nesting grounds for shrimp, oysters and countless other varieties of sea life are destroyed by the leak at the bottom of the ocean that nobody seems to be able to deal with.

The economic damage is another entirely different animal that is going to rock the Gulf Coast and head inland with reverberations that will be seriously felt around the whole country.

The Obama administration is completely lost on how to deal with the spill and the president seems helpless except to appoint commissions and place blame anywhere except 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.

I know that an oil leak at this depth has never had to be dealt with before and is a seriously difficult thing to fix, but somewhere on this earth, somebody knows how to fix it and it's high time to find him or her.

The other part of the equation, the cleanup, is a horse of a different color and there are literally hundreds of ways to go about that, practical and simple methods that seem to either go over or under Obama's head.

I've seen demonstrations on television using things as mundane as the hay I feed my animals to clean up the oil. There are fabrics that have been developed that soak up the oil and reject the water and there is any number of machines people have come forward with, but none of them are appearing on the horrible scene on the Gulf Coast beaches.

Why is Obama afraid to let common citizens test the methods they've come up with, what could it possibly hurt.

Let's just use a little cowboy logic in this situation.

Bring all these people with ideas to the Gulf Coast, give them all a stretch of water to work with and see which ones work the best.

That's so simple and what can it hurt? Let the people try out their ideas. If they don't work they can simply be disregarded without any harm to anybody. If they work the can be deployed en mass.

I know the walls of the White House are covered with ivy league diplomas and Nobel Prizes, but there isn't enough common sense in that bunch to change a spark plug.

It's time for the politicians to stop using this crisis for an excuse to raise our taxes and advance their confounded socialist agenda.

It's time for them to get out of the way and let the people with the practical ideas have a go at cleaning up this mess.

And by the way President Obama, the moratorium on drilling in the Gulf is nothing less than pure dumb. You're taking the last vestige of economic hope away from people who have no way left to make a living because no matter how much money British Petroleum ponies up, it's going to run out way before those shrimp and oyster beds come back and long before the tourists start streaming back to the Gulf Coast.

Stopping the drilling is nothing less than cheap political pandering and another sign of the total lack of experience in your administration.

Just more proof of your lack of understanding and just how baffled you are by your job.

You're lost, Mr. President. Why don't you admit it and look for some help among the great, unwashed masses. I think you'd find that we're pretty dern good people who have been solving problems for generations.

Maybe you can't 'plug the damn hole" but you can get out of the way and let some people with the common sense your administration lacks come in and do something right for a change.

And believe me, it would really be a change.