Forty days and forty nights...

Has the sickening, horrendous and seemingly unstoppable fountain of oil spewed forth from a mile beneath the Gulf of Mexico. Of course BP is at fault, and criminally so. It may not matter, because if BP is found criminally negligent, as they have been before, not one will go to prison. No one ever does from these corporations.

Up here in Alaska a few years back some guy got drunk and angry, took his high-powered rifle and shot a hole in the Alaska Pipeline. The amount of oil is like a millionth of the oil now gushing from Deep Horizon. Plus, nobody died, yet our drunken Alaskan angry man went to jail. Alaska's Prince William Sound is still smarting from the Exxon Valdez spill, but BP is going to make Exxon look like amateurs before it's over.

Which brings us to job of President Obama in regards to the Gulf spill: Has he done enough to bring BP to heel and to bring the might that is the U.S. Government into the action? I give him a qualified yes on both of these. BP lied to Obama as well as the American people about the seriousness of Deep Horizon's mile-down blowout, and even if he was utterly naive to trust them, he, like everyone else in America, had no good reason to think that the huge oil conglomerate did NOT have the expertise to handle such a contingency. As far using his power of the presidency, what do people like LA Governor Jindal, or Southern pundit James Carville (who really put on an embarrassing performance on TV) think he can do about this? Should he send up the "Bat Signal?" Call in The A team? And is Obama the Hand-holder-in-chief of the United States? Should he forget about Afghanistan, Iraq, North Korea, the economy and the other 100 crises going on at the moment?

A SOLUTION:
Colin Powell made an appearance on ABC's This Week this morning, and he was asked if there was a "military" solution to the gulf oil spill. Colin responded by talking about military operations, chain-of-command, logistics, and he appeared to think that the military could help, but he wasn't quite sure how.

I have a suggestion for General Powell to take to the president, and it's a military solution. In fact it's one the military has practiced for since the 1950s. Why not lower a low yield (5 - 10 Kiloton range) nuclear device down to the spill's source and detonate it? Now don't tell me someone in an advisory capacity to Obama hasn't at least thought of it. The nuclear explosion would make a large glass bowl out of that immediate area, ignite and consume all the oil in the area, and probably wouldn't kill anything that's not dead already. Yes, radiation would be a problem for a couple of weeks, but we're not looking at anything as bad as Godzilla or giant glowing gulf shrimp devouring New Orleans. And it's not like we've never done undewater nuclear testing. This something President Obama can, and should consider. How many months or years of this ecological nightmare are we willing to abide?

Riposting...

Former President Clinton’s fellow Arkansan and syndicated opinion writer Paul Greenberg either misunderstands or misrepresents Clinton’s words of warning about the current lack of civility in political discourse.
Greenberg misses the obvious point that Clinton has not warned us against peaceful protest (that’s “civil,” right?), but against the incitement to violence that we currently see among the various militia types, 2nd Amendment monomaniacs and secessionists. The same sort of wing nuts Clinton himself had to deal with in the 1990s.
Neither can Greenberg credibly equate the hate and vitriol that President Obama has experienced, from the day he took office, with the protests against President Bush. Anti-Bush protests really only began after Bush and Cheney lied us into a war on Iraq, a country that had absolutely nothing to do with 9/11, thereby wasting thousands of American lives, 100,000+ Iraqi lives, and perhaps $3 trillion before all is finally, and sadly, said and done.