RUSH: All right, now to the oil spill. CNN: ‘It sounds like a Hollywood movie. An impending disaster — think the disabled spacecraft in ‘Apollo 13’ or the asteroid hurtling toward Earth in ‘Armageddon’ — prompts a daring intervention by engineers to save the day. This time, the threat is oil gushing from a broken well on the bottom of the Gulf of Mexico that could destroy livelihoods and irreplaceable coastal wetlands. Equally real is the attempted engineering marvel — a four-story metal container that will be lowered onto the leaking pipe to try to suck in the flowing oil. Officials of BP, the oil giant that owns the leaking well, said Monday they plan to try the unprecedented effort this week. If successful, they say, the ‘pollution containment chamber’ could reduce the underwater gusher by more than 80 percent and provide the first success in industry and government efforts –‘ There aren’t any government efforts. This is the whole point.
OBAMA: Government can build the infrastructure that allows products and services to reach customers. Government can create incentives and clean energy, for example, that promote innovation and exports. These things are public goods that no business, no individual, is gonna provide on their own. But they create a favorable environment in which everybody, companies across the country, can open and expand.
RUSH: He does not know what he’s talking about. He’s pure propaganda here trying to sell the greatness of the government. It’s not just enough to sell the greatness of government. He’s gotta go out and trash the private sector. Private individuals aren’t going to do good works; corporations aren’t going to do good works; only government will do good works, only government is good, we are the good people. Private individuals and private sector business are evil and we’re gonna keep demonizing until everybody understands that they are the biggest problem the country faces. Now, Politico: ‘White House in P.R. ‘Panic’ Over Spill — The ferocious oil leak in the Gulf of Mexico is threatening President Barack Obama’s reputation for competence, just as surely as it endangers the Gulf ecosystem.’ Would somebody explain to me why he has ever had a reputation for competence when he’s never done anything? Now, I could answer my own question. He has had a reputation for competence ’cause he’s a clean, articulate black guy who doesn’t speak with a Negro dialect, quote, unquote, Harry Reid. The way he speaks has conveyed confidence, has conveyed intelligence, refinement, erudition, sophistication. He’s a walking disaster! The closest experience he has to this oil rig is Bill Ayers, ’cause his buddy Bill Ayers knows how to blow things up.
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RUSH: Salon.com from yesterday. Headline: ‘Who’s to Blame for the Oil Spill? Answer: Dick Cheney.’ I predicted it. Halliburton’s involved! Yeah. Right. Here it is. ‘Is that not enough reason to blame the former Dark Lord of the Naval Observatory? Guess what: Halliburton is involved, too! ‘The Los Angeles Times reports that BP contracted Dick Cheney’s old company to cement the deepwater drill hole. Cementing the hole was, according to the U.S. Minerals Management Service, ‘the single most-important factor in 18 of 39 well blowouts in the Gulf of Mexico over a 14-year period.’ And Hallburton is already under investigation for faulty cementing in an Australian well last year.’ Don’t doubt me on this, folks. When I make these predictions, I know what I’m talking about because I know the people about whom I’m predicting. A lot of Dead Sea turtles are turning up in Galveston, Texas, on the Texas shore where the oil spill has not yet hit.
In fact, I got a couple e-mails. One of the AP pictures of a dead see turtle that they claim was poisoned by the oil well? ‘Rush, I’m a sea turtle expert like you are. I don’t have a foundation set up for them like you do, but I look at that picture. That sea turtle’s a freshwater sea turtle. What’s it doing in the Gulf?’ It was one or the other, it was a seawater turtle found in freshwater or something. That turtle didn’t die from oil. These 30 turtles that died down in Galveston, Texas, in that area, there’s no oil slick down there. What’s killing them? Are people forgetting to turn of the lights or something down in Galveston? Do they not have an ordinance down there bout turning off the lights? I don’t know, but I mean there’s all kinds of inexplicable stuff happening out there involving Marine wildlife. Obama seems to have a huge animus against these animals because he’s doing nothing to stop this slick other than demonizing British Petroleum for it by keeping the boot on their necks.
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RUSH: I have an Associated Press story in my formerly nicotine-stained fingers, ten writers on this story. It’s date-lined New Orleans, the headline: ‘Attention Shoppers: Gulf Spill Could Affect You — The calamitous oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico…’ which is not Barack Obama’s fault — it doesn’t say that, but I know they thought it when they wrote it ‘…isn’t just a mess for the people who live or work on the coast. If you drink coffee, eat shrimp, like bananas or plan to buy a new set of tires, you could end up paying more because of the disaster. The slick has forced the shutdown of the gulf’s rich fishing grounds and could also spread to the busy shipping lanes at the mouth of the Mississippi River, tying up the cargo vessels that move millions of tons of fruit, rubber, grain, steel and other commodities and raw materials in and out of the nation’s interior.’
And, by the way, they do that with diesel fuel, not wind turbines or solar panels. The slick has forced all these problems. ‘Though a total shutdown of the shipping lanes is unlikely, there could be long delays if vessels are forced to wait to have their oil-coated hulls power-washed to avoid contaminating the Mississippi. Some cargo ships might choose to unload somewhere else in the U.S. That could drive up costs,’ because there would be ground shipping charges since they couldn’t get to the port that they wanted to get to. Audio sound bites, Douglas Brinkley, presidential historian, last night on CNN Cooper said, ‘Leaving nature to take its course clearly doesn’t make any sense here.’
BRINKLEY: The disaster has been BP, and I think those two initials are the DDT of our era. When you think back in 1962, Silent Spring, a whole country woke up to what pesticides do to the environment. That’s what this spill is doing to the Gulf. People are going to have to wake up anew.
BRINKLEY: There’s no comparison whatsoever between them. This was a corporate bungle and maybe three or four corporations by the end of the day of a deadly magnitude. Katrina had an engineering failure, the levees in New Orleans, and this is also an engineering failure, and there’s a connection there, but the Obama administration has done nothing wrong. This has been British Petroleum not having a plan A or a plan B or a plan C or a plan D for capping this. They are winging it.
RUSH: They’re the only ones working on fixing it. The Obama administration has failed to follow a protocol established in 1994. There were no booms to put out the flames on the surface, even though they’d be recommended as far back as the Clinton administration. Notice how far these statists go to exempt all of the rampant incompetence in government and try to pass all of the incompetence off on people in the private sector who do jobs that Douglas Brinkley wouldn’t last five minutes in. And now the lead spokesman — well, it’s a toss-up here between RFK Jr. and Algore — we’re still at CNN, Larry King Live interviewed Robert Kennedy Jr. Larry King said, ‘BP, the oil company says that while BP is responsible for dealing with the oil gushing, for cleaning it up, it’s not responsible for the accident. They note the rig which exploded and sank was run by Transocean’s, said it was their people and their processes. Do you agree with that, Robert?’
KENNEDY: The culprit that I think people are more focusing on today is Halliburton because Halliburton actually poured the cement and the accident occurred as the cement filling of the casing was completed. If the wrong cement is used, if it’s poorly applied, it can lead to this kind of explosion, and so Halliburton now has become one of the major culprits.
RUSH: Yeah. So again, the template, these people, their brains have just stopped. There’s no inquiry or curiosity. So, Halliburton, Halliburton, Halliburton, Halliburton, Halliburton, that’s all you have to know, but then he wasn’t through. He was on MSNBC Live this morning this morning. Monica Novotny, the infobabe, said, ‘I want to get to the specific complaints in the lawsuit, quote, the fire, the explosion, the resulting oil spill caused by joint negligence and fault of the defendants. What do you know, RFK Jr.? What can you tell us about what went on there on that oil rig?’ Which is absolutely nothing ’cause he wasn’t there. But nevertheless he endeavored to answer it.
KENNEDY: This goes back to the kind of a lax attitude by the minerals management agency during the Bush administration and by high levels of the Bush administration. In 2003, the Bush administration, people within the minerals management agency were urging the requirement for all Gulf Oil rigs that a device called an acoustic regulator be put on the rig. This is a device that can remotely shut down the rig and shut down the rig at the wellhead if there is an emergency. The only device that was on this rig was a button device that had to be pressed by one of the workers, and that device was in a part of the rig that was in the centerpiece of the explosion.
RUSH: (laughing) And we could trace it back to Bush in 2003, to the lax attitude by minerals management agency. (laughing) And of course Monica Novotny is sitting there, oh, yeah. Nodding her head, oh, like she’s listening to Albert Einstein explaining the answer to this. Oh, yeah, no doubt about it. Arnold Schwarzenegger completes his conversion of full-fledged liberal. He held a press conference at McClellan airfield, Sacramento, yesterday.
SCHWARZENEGGER: I see on TV the birds drenched in oil, the fishermen out of work, the massive oil slick destroying our precious ecosystem. It would not happen in California.
RUSH: No, it would not happen in California. I single-handedly would destroy the California economy. (laughing) Okay.
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