1. Here's an activity for the whole family:
Murdered Gulf has put out this flyer for a Jackson Square protest in New Orleans this Sunday at 1 p.m. Even if only the 1500 people who say they're going to attend (in that charming Facebook commitment way) actually do, it will be bigger than nearly every Tea Party rally. The Rude Pundit wishes he could be there, but, alas, he won't be down until July. Someone do him a favor and send him pictures. And maybe start a chant of "Eat me, BP."
2. In a strange confluence of two of the major themes of this week's news, shareholders at ExxonMobil have once again refused to add protections for LGBT workers to the corporation's non-discrimination policy. So, if you needed another reason to think that everyone running oil companies is a barbaric, hateful, avaricious piece of shit who would fuck a pelican corpse if they could get a little more gas out of it, well, now you have more evidence to support your well-considered position.
3. From the New York Times on April 3, 1989: "Mr. Bush has rejected the idea of a Federal takeover of the Valdez cleanup and has reiterated his support for drilling in the wildlife refuge."
April 7, 1989: "Alaskan officials said today that the spreading oil slick from the Exxon Valdez threatened thousands of miles of shoreline, and they insisted that only Federal intervention could prevent further environmental damage."
April 12, 1989: "Not until April 7, 14 days after the accident, did [Bush] order a larger Federal role in the cleanup effort - long after it had become universally clear that the oil companies had botched the job."
Article after article back in 1989 talked about the federal government's lame, at best, response to the crisis.
Bush never went to Alaska. He sent Vice President Dan Quayle, who said he would report on his firsthand experience to the president. And by September 15, 1989, Exxon said it was done and walked away from the clean-up, thus giving it the time to prepare to lay waste to lawsuits against it. By December, Transportation Secretary Samuel Skinner praised Exxon for its response, even as environmentalists said that the long-term effects had been ignored, something that's borne out now, over twenty years later, by the continuing toxicity of areas of Prince William Sound.
The point here is not to defend the Obama administration's response to the Gulf oil catastrophe. The Rude Pundit's not gonna do that, except to say that, however you might think about it, Obama's miles and miles ahead of what Bush the Smarter did back at the start of his damned presidency.
No, actually, the point here is to say, "Oh, go fuck yourself with Reagan's femur" to craven columnist and creepy commentator Peggy Noonan, who writes in today's Wall Street Journal (motto: "Rupert Murdoch's taint is nicely powdered"), "The disaster in the Gulf may well spell the political end of the president and his administration, as she compares Obama to Bush the Dumber during Katrina.
Noonan conveniently leaves out the Exxon Valdez story, which is a more appropriate analogy than Katrina. Why? Because this overpaid slattern was working for Bush the Smarter during and after the Valdez spill, writing speeches to attempt to spin his criminal incompetence into principle, his boobish aloofness into engagement. She made people believe the lie that Bush gave a goddamn about the environment. This is not even to mention her aiding and abetting Ronald Reagan, whose administration's mad deregulation spree is one of the factors that led to the very oil spill Noonan is spewing about now.
And, thus, like so many of our corrupted punditerati, her opinion is pretty much a junk shot.
