25 May 2010

British Petroleum Oil Spill Cartoon Highlights




These cartoonists say more in these panels about the British Petroleum Oil Spill than I could write all week.



Plus my writing mojo is a little off since I haven't written anything in a few days. As funny and as sad as these cartoons are, I know BP is working its ass off to try and stop this. I know our government really isn't equipped to do more than watch as they work.




What gets me and millions upon millions of others hot as fire over this thing is the bullshit BP's PR machine has been trying to push to make it seem like it is a much smaller spill than it really is.





The parts of government that people should really want to see changed are agencies like the Minerals Management Service, but we seem to be stuck on the same old TV friendly controversies like race, or abortion, or religion.  




Whether or not we have a live feed of the leak that is really a live feed or a loop of the same footage over and over is the latest debate, a debate that BP has brought on itself.
When you stonewall about flow rates, or try to scare away the media, or purposefully dissemble on TV day after day the way BP has, you actually increase the hysteria surrounding the whole mess.






There is no equivalent of Paul Revere in the animal kingdom. If there were, he would have been overwhelmed by the task of crying out warnings all along the Gulf Coast.





As far as our own government goes, Mr. Obama seems to have lost his affection for the TV cameras temporarily.


I'd like to say its the lawyer in him that makes him so reticent at a time when an anxious nation needs to see him on the job in oily hipwaders, peering out at the Gulf. Or maybe the pragmatist in him that realizes that his presence on the scene would disrupt some of the containment effort.




The talking points and buzzwords sound nice




until you realize that they are just words if you don't take any action to back them up.




What President Obama needs to think about, in this nation of symbols, is how strong an image it would be to the American people to watch him wrestle with something that mattered once in awhile instead of the political wrestling matches between him and Congress that are mostly staged for our benefit.



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