Teabaggers hero Rand Paul on Gulf oil: "Accidents happen."

[NNN0LHI]

http://www.time.com/time/politics/article/0,8599,1992165,00.html

In the Arena

Who's to Blame for the Gulf Oil Spill?

By Joe Klein Thursday, May. 27, 2010

My favorite metaphor, among the myriad gushing forth from the Great Oil Spill in the Gulf of Mexico, is the "junk shot." The notion that the propulsion of man-made garbage — chunks of metal, knotted ropes, golf balls (!) and so forth — into the mess of busted pipes might stanch the flow of liquid-carbon garbage had a certain ring to it. Let the junk bury the junk. It seemed so perfectly polluted, but then everything about the disaster reeked of garbage. British Petroleum, the perpetrator of the mess, had greened its logo in recent years, noisily announced its commitment to environmentalism and styled itself as Beyond Petroleum, which was a prime example of postmodern, focus-grouped fecal marketing. Even the chemical that BP sprayed to disperse the spill, a product hilariously called Corexit, was toxic when used in such large quantities, according to the government. Reality had taken its revenge: BP now stood for Biggest Polluter. Indeed, the uncontrolled corruption of the spill — the failure of government, business and technology to manage an essential, if archaic, resource — beggared all human pretense. Nature was mocking the conservative faith in untrammeled market freedom and the liberal faith that market excesses can be regulated.

The Republican Party seemed an especially fat target for Mother Earth's satiric vengeance. It was, after all, the party that had branded itself with the slogan "Drill, baby, drill" during the 2008 presidential campaign, a party that busily denied the mass of scientific evidence about global carbon pollution. Rush Limbaugh first speculated that the spill might have been the work of environmental terrorists but then settled on this remarkable formulation: "The ocean will take care of this on its own." The oil was "natural. It's as natural as the ocean water is." Thus Rush upended several millenniums of "oil and water" adages. Less foolish but no less feckless was Rand Paul — the Tea Party's Kentucky tribune and hero to high school libertarians everywhere — who dismissed the disaster with a blithe "Accidents happen." This echoed Donald Rumsfeld's famous line after the anarchic looting broke out in Baghdad: "Stuff happens." But this sort of stuff is more likely to happen when government refuses to plan and regulate for worst-case scenarios.

[indepat]

1. No, f'erhead, accidents such as this are caused and therefore not even an accident

:grr:

[Aviation Pro]

2. You mean like you, Ayn Rand?

Yet another worthless bag of fuck.

[gratuitous]

3. "Mother Earth's satiric vengeance"

Oh, thank you, Joke Line, for putting this into context. All you folks who have watched your livelihoods subsumed under a tidal wave of oil and tar balls, kwitcherbitchin. It's just "satiric vengeance" on the nitwit Republicans, according to Joke Line. Not aimed at you personally or anything like that. You're just collateral damage as the earth tries to teach a lesson to Rush Limbaugh and Rand Paul.

Don't you all feel better about it, now? I wonder if Joke Line will still think of this as "satiric vengance" when the oil moves up the Gulf Stream and inundates a few beaches he's more familiar with?