His Rudeness on the Gulf oil spill

Cartoon by Patrick Corrigan, The Toronto Star

You are regularly reading The Rude Pundit, yes? If not, get yourself over there right now and be sure to bookmark the blog. (I wouldn't recommend reading his posts aloud if there are tender-eared children present, but oh my, can Lee ever make me laugh, and wince, and cry...)

He lambasts the GOP's hypocritical response (this is all President Obama's fault? Really?) to the horrific and ongoing oil spill that is already killing sea turtles and fish, and which is now threatening the entire west coast of this state--where several of America's most beautiful, pristine beaches are located--right down to the Florida Keys, where delicate coral heads and ocean ecosystems are barely hanging on as it is, and after this disaster, will likely suffer for many years to come, if indeed they're ever able to recover.

I'll add just one thing Rude's spot-on piece: one of those Panhandle luxury waterfront homes belongs to Karl Rove. Somehow, that fact doesn't make me feel the tiniest bit better.

Anyway, in its no-punches-pulled entirety:

The Gulf of Mexico Oil Spill Will Wreck Your Pathetic Ideology:

Tell you what, motherfuckers, when dead people are left to rot in the sun because of the incompetence of the federal government, when corpses are floating in the streets, when the President passively ignores the pleas of the governors of Gulf Coast states, when entire neighborhoods have been physically destroyed, when the federal government strands tens of thousands of people without food or water, when the federal government starts to blame the local governments, when the President praises the work of a failed, incompetent bureaucrat while a major city rots, then you can say that this is Barack Obama's "Katrina."

But until this happens, good, sweet conservative bags of fuck who need so desperately to drag this president down, the Gulf of Mexico oil leak is a corporate-created disaster, and it actually serves to demonstrate, starkly, and with a semen-like sheen, as if the ocean floor is in the midst of a prolonged sweet crude ejaculation, the utter failure of deregulation and the bullshit notion that capitalistic enterprises can police themselves when it comes to safety and environmental standards, whether it was, in this case, BP or Transocean or whoever. In other words, once again, as with so many things, this is about your ideology belly-flopping, much like, you know, when Katrina showed how years of neglect of the levees would lead to a nightmare.

So now Bobby Jindal, formerly of the "states can solve problems" crowd, is coming to the federal government with his hands out like a New Delhi beggar with leprosy. Hell, Haley Barbour already knows the routine. Bob Riley's about to discover that money from the fed ain't so bad now. Bow and scrape, assholes, as an environmental catastrophe that's coming your way is gonna destroy jobs, tourism, and wetlands.

Right now, as the Rude Pundit writes this, the booms that were set up to protect the beaches in Alabama and Mississippi are failing. They're being blown onto shore by the winds, by the waves. Dead things are washing up, too. The fishing's been halted. Pretty soon, the white, white sands, the Aryan beaches of the Redneck Riviera are going to get dingier and dingier looking, even more than when swarms of UA kids head there to vomit in the sun on spring break.

Yes, some day soon, a man with his Gulf Shores timeshare, probably a proud and loyal teabagger, will look out over his balcony during the two weeks a year he takes his family on vacation and see the bits of black that are rolling up onto the shore. And he'll wonder, even if they do everything they can, why the feds couldn't clean it up sooner. Then he'll go inside and watch Hannity or listen to Limbaugh tell him that his taxes are too high and that business, not Washington, can solve all his problems.