Well, thank the heavens and Halle-f***ing-lujah! Not using a Nuke might just be the first intelligent decision this administration has made.
For better or worse, America is now a nation of money managers (yours truly, guilty as charged), lawyers, accountants, programers, nurses, clerical workers, professors of woman's studies (hehehehehe!), etc... gone are the days where large numbers of us fixed our own cars, changed the oil, repaired the roof... the vast, vast majority of us has ZERO mechanical expertise, and accordingly, we really believe, almost on religious level, that our government can handle the evacuation of a half million people from an undetermined location (hurricanes like Katrina are notoriously fickle about where they land) in a matter of HOURS... or stop an Oil well blow out in 5,000 feet of water in a matter of days.
(Being a Wall Street Kn0w-Nothing I remember watching in AWE as my older brothers would build a gas station, literally from the tanks set deep in in the ground to the roof. Tanks, pipes, pumps, pump island, signs, building, electrical, welding, bathroom plumbing... these guys could do just about anything mechanically and given enough time solve any mechanical problem. If you took ALL of the MBA's and Phd's on Wall Street and all of the "Journalists" in the MSM and drove them up to this real life erector set they wouldn't know a backhoe from ARC welder; if you took them to my farm I would be willing to bet on the same sort of problem.)
There is an old saying in the military: "Amateurs talk strategy, professionals talk logistics". In other words, flanking strategy is less important than food, water, port-o-poties, and toilet paper in a military campaign.
It is my assertion that a nation that can't change a flat tire probably has some unreasonable expectations when assessing a GOM well blow out or a hurricane evacuation.
There is a great deal of "Get Some Even" going on here. A great many Non-Dems are furious at the treatment of GWB in the Katrina disaster; I know this is hard for the Obama "true-believers" and other Dems, but GWB was no more responsible for the unreasonable expectations of the American people (which the Media stocked with reckless abandon) than BHO is, in this case for the inability of TPTB to cap the Horizon Well in 5,000 feet of water. But that does not change the political realities; the Dems drew first blood, and did so with GREAT SUCCESS in the Katrina episode... and now the Non-Dems (that's my term for the 2 parties within the Republican party - the Libertarians and the not-so-Libertarian, as well as registered independents) are using that play book against its creators.
Well, that's just the way it is in American politics. It will be up to the electorate to reward or punish this strategy. My bet is they will continue to reward it, and that Obama unemployment slip is on its way.
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B.P. is Britain's biggest tax payer. I wonder how they feel about losing this revenue source. B.P. is also the biggest dividend payor into the U.K.'s vast pension system and largest contributor to that nation's "Safety Net". The U.S. needs the U.K.'s support in Iraq, Afghanistan, the United Nations, and in any future conflict... Somebody should call up New York's Senator Schumer... he thinks B.P. should suspend its dividend...
Don't you just love unintended consequences?
Americans that are IN LOVE with Europe's safety net should keep in mind that most of the contributions for that in country's like Norway and the U.K. come from OIL REVENUES. No Oil revenues - NO SAFETY NET.