Morning rant

Just a quick rant before I have to run off to work.

As someone who loves the city of New Orleans and the Mississippi Gulf Coast I am as dismayed by what is happening in regard to the still unfolding ecological disaster as anyone. However my desire to see America drill for every drop of oil, both on land and off shore, that we have has not diminished.

We simply need to oil too badly. It is the fuel which powers or economy and makes possible our liberty and our life style. We live longer than any people in history we are less troubled by disease and only a tiny percentage of our children die in infancy or early childhood - unlike the nearly 50% who used to only a few hundred years ago.

One of the largest health problems facing our poor is obesity. Imagine another time in the history of the world when one of the primary problems facing the people at the very bottom of the socio-economic ladder was that they had too damn much food!

Thanks to planes, trains and automobiles we are the most mobile people in the history of the world. Our military is the most powerful combat force in the history of the world. We have more information at our fingertips on virtually any topic, from current events to particle physics, than any people in history. We have more consumer choices than any people in history and more leisure time in which to enjoy those choices.

While all these benefits flow from our capitalist free market economic system and our system of limited government with plenty of checks and balances none of them would be possible without the added blessing of relatively inexpensive energy.

This is why the free flow of oil at market prices is one of America's most pressing strategic interests. And that is why America must "drill baby drill" at all costs.

However the need for oil and the need to accept risks to get at the oil does not automatically mean that what is happening in the Gulf of Mexico today is/was inevitable. The fact is that what is happening right now is, to borrow a phrase, a man-made catastrophe of epic proportions.

And I lay the lion's share of the blame for the current disaster at the feet of two stupid and irresponsible parties. One is the environmental movement (and the Democrat party which aids and abets them) and the other is the state government of Florida.

Those two moronic entities are the primary reason that the oil rig which blew up was far out in deep water rather than much closer to shore in much shallower water.

If the rig had been in shallow water the leak would have been plugged withing three days (at most) and the oil slick could have been contained well enough that it would have been an inconvenience rather than a calamity.

But eco-loons who hate the very idea of oil in the first place and Florida politicians - Jeb Bush prominent among them - who are in the pocket of Florida's tourist industry shut down shallow water drilling in the Gulf and off Florida's coast.

Well look what their activism has brought about. The fragile wetlands of the Gulf coast and the beautiful beaches of both the Gulf and Atlantic coasts of Florida are in danger from a gushing deep-water oil well which no one seems able to cap. When, let me repeat, a shallow well would have been capped withing a few days.

I hope that all the enemies of shallow water drilling are fraking proud of themselves.