Like Stacy, I didn’t watch President Obama’s speech last night because I was busy on something else. Besides, as readers of this blog may remember, I usually read the transcripts instead of watching politicians’ speeches since that way I’m looking at content instead of body language, intonation, etc.
You can watch the video on YouTube in 12 parts. Here’s part 1:
Here is the transcript of last night’s speech.
You can summarize the speech into this:
- It’s a disaster. But “it’s more like an epidemic”. Which is it, then?
- “make no mistake: We will fight this spill with everything we’ve got for as long as it takes”
- There’s a cleanup going on
- Chu won a Nobel Prize
- “Wrenching anxiety”
- Obama’s finally going to meet with the chairman of BP
- More bureaucracy to come: National Commission, new Csar, more regulation. “Cleaning house”.
- A lawyer with no oil industry knowledge or experience will be in charge.
- Moratorium on offshore drilling, green jobs, “the need to end America’s century-long addiction to fossil fuels”, bottom line = it’s going to cost you
- And if that fails, pray.
Even the guys at MSNBC were underwhelmed: MSNBC Trashes Obama’s Address: Compared To Carter, “I Don’t Sense Executive Command”. Hardly surprising, since there wasn’t any.
Though ‘cleaning house’ is not exactly the same as knowing how to fix a leak or supervise oil drilling, it may have to do. But maybe it’s close enough for government work. And the intention is to fix things someday. Fix it so’s we never to drill. And for that we look to Cathay. The President in his speech from the Oval Office said that America was falling behind China in Green Jobs and he was not going to let that happen.
Countries like China are investing in clean energy jobs and industries that should be here in America. Each day, we send nearly $1 billion of our wealth to foreign countries for their oil. And today, as we look to the Gulf, we see an entire way of life being threatened by a menacing cloud of black crude.
We cannot consign our children to this future. The tragedy unfolding on our coast is the most painful and powerful reminder yet that the time to embrace a clean energy future is now. Now is the moment for this generation to embark on a national mission to unleash American innovation and seize control of our own destiny.
In that Green paradise Birnbaum may have a future after all, after Bromwich finishes cleaning house. But not everybody believes this grandiose scheme will come to pass because if the current administration can’t plug a hole, or talk to a company about how to plug a hole, then that glittering prospect at overhauling China at Green Jobs may be beyond it’s competence to attain. Overhauling more than a trillion industrious Chinese will be harder than meeting one BP CEO. And the implication of what the state of the administration’s competence is may be depressing. The most lugubrious site on the Internet after the President’s speech is the comments section of the Huffington Post, because what do you know, not even die-hard liberals are buying it. A few die hard optimists point out that “Yes, BP will lose billions from this oil spill, but they’ll make TRILLIONS when the new Energy Bills passes”. After all, BP helped write it: “McConnell Charges That ‘Major Part’ of Democrats’ Cap-Trade Bill ‘Essentially Written by BP’”. But for many of the other commenters such consolations were inadequate; the truth was painfully obvioius. There’s nobody home. And it’s beginning to dawn on them that maybe there never was anybody home. This means that for next two and half years America will be trailing a slick of blood, like a giant wounded whale, careering across the seas like the ghost ships of yesterday’s legend, bound for nowhere but the horizon.
But that’s in the future. The immediate problem is right here, right now. Little Miss Atilla:
It seems to me that the President is jumping the gun in discussing long-range plans for alternative energies. I can see that there isn’t a moment to lose in tackling the problems at the Minerals Management Service, but that’s as far-reaching as he should get right now while the oil is still flowing at this prodigious rate.
It’s as if the Brits and the U.S. Congress had held their hearings on the Titanic disaster while people were still drowning. Let’s save their lives, and then talk to the shipbuilders about their construction standards, shall we? Get people out of the icy-cold water, and afterward you can form all the damned commissions you want.
Indeed.
Instapundit has a mini-roundup.
Speech done. Time to suck up a Bushwacker with a straw.
UPDATE
Obama’s clean energy pivot goes awry
