So a lot of Republicans like Limbaugh and Haley Barbour are trying their best to convince everyone that the current oil spill is not a big deal. They are saying things like oil is as natural as the sea water and other unbelievable shit.
However, the government response to the oil spill seems like one thing that the Repubs could really hammer Obama with in the election. Not that the government could really do anything about the spill, mind you, but Repubs could run a lot of misleading ads blaming the whole thing on the democrats.
It would seem that two of the Republicans’ biggest knee-jerk reactions are working against each other here. The first is the reflexive defense of big business. The other is the criticism of anything Obama does. I can see an ad where Obama says “I was going to do something about the oil spill, but then Rush told me that oil was natural as the sea water, so I figured everything was A-OK.”
In the end though, just like with everything else, Republican voters will be too dense to notice the hypocrisy, or will notice it and apply their baffling (to me) ability to cling doggedly to mutually exclusive beliefs.
And then you’d see a non-stop loop of Palin et al screaming “Drill Baby, Drill”. I think the strategists have looked at all sides of this, and have come down on the “Oil is just as natural as butterfly wings and babies kisses” side.
Ah, you must have missed the latest update from cuckooville; Palin tweeted that the oil spill proved “Drill baby drill” to be correct, because she was always referring to drilling in the Alaska National Wildlife Refuge when she said it.
Here’s one Republican solution that will work: a massive expansion of nuclear power. The French already produce 73% of their energy from nuclear fission-I can’t see why we can’t do that except we are stopped by idiots who think an American power plant is equivalent to that of a Soviet one. :rolleyes:
While the idea of nuclear-powered roadsters is not without a certain retro-futuristic charm–I bet an atomic-powered car would also be able to fly!–there are certain practical details to be worked out.
Oil is overwhelmingly used for transportation fuel like gasoline. Nuclear power–and I’m not disagreeing we need to pursue it more aggressively in light of the global warming issue–is used to make electricity for the power grid. (And the chief problems with purely electrically powered cars aren’t so much the availability of electricity as they are things like battery re-charge times vs. the time it takes to fill up a gas tank, cruising range of batteries vs. a gas tank, and toxic byproducts from battery production and disposal.)
Highly unlikely. Because “oil” is synonymous with Republicans, I think the lay person would think the oil spill is the republican’s fault anyway, or another leftover from the Bush campaign.
I haven’t read about the issue at all, and I would say that it is about 90% likely to be Bush’ fault.
“Thankfully you turned what could have been another Cheyrnobyl into a mere Three Mile Island.”
-Mr. Burns, The Simpsons
Maybe those “idiots” are having a hard time actually believing that nuclear power plants as “safe” as they have been told after seeing how “safe” offshore oil rigs are?
I don’t follow the conservative news programs as much as you people, however the very obvious Republican strategy is to paint Obama as if his response has been ineffectual and his leadership lacking.
Again, it’s not obvious. The theme of the Obama Administration, for those who have been paying attention, is fixing problems the Republicans caused. As Superhal notes, for even the most knee-jerkingly defensive conservative, oil is practically synonymous with Republican, and criticizing Obama’s handling of the spill will invariably lead to, “well, you shouldn’t have fucked it up in the first place.”
I don’t know that the average layperson would blame the Republicans at all. People are looking at 1) who and what caused the spill in the first place? and 2) how is the capping of the well and cleanup being handled?
And also keep in mind that all the states bordering the Gulf of Mexico are Red States.
Americans have a strange notion that what happens to the rest of the country is their business. Look at the Pit thread about the “mosque” being built kind-of-sort-of-near Ground Zero.
While support for nuclear power is bipartisan, so is opposition to it. True, there are still poorly-educated hippies out there who think that nuclear power is inherently more dangerous than what it would replace, but there are also right-wingers who are convinced that anything other than actual nuclear weapons involving radioactive material will be stolen by terrorists and turned into a bomb.
msmith537, you say that as if reducing a disaster to a mere Three Mile Island is a bad thing. If only the average Interstate car crash, for example, were reduced to the severity of the Three Mile Island disaster, the world would be a better place.
There are plenty of educated hippies who know Obama actually alloted money for nuclear power. During the ten years or so it takes to build one ,we may get past that poor designed , expensive crappy energy system and spend money in renewable energy and conservation. That is the hope.
I think that deserves repeating: If the average automobile accident on an Interstate highway had the same amount of harmful effects as the ‘Three Mile Island disaster’, the world would be a better place.
Let’s set up a hypothetical situation to drive this home: On March 28, 1979, the day Three Mile Island’s Unit 2 suffered its catastrophic failure, Tom, Dick, and Harry were at work. Tom, a farmer in Dauphin County, was harrowing his fields preparatory to spring planting, outdoors without protective clothing one mile downwind from TMI. Dick worked a normal shift without incident at a coal-fired power plant in Indiana. And Harry, a professional accountant, spent the day working on an audit in his office in a brick building in Denver. Of the three, the one whose exposure to ionizing radiation and carcinogens was the lowest was Tom.
I’ve read studies that state the radiation leak at 3 Mile Island was strong and pockets of birth defects and cancers have resulted. They state that the idea that nobody died as a result of the incident is false.
It would be even more surprising if birth defects were distributed uniformly.
50 years from now people will look back on the anti-nuclear folks as similar to the collaborators in France: “Daddy what did you do when the earth was warming due to greenhouse gases?”.
With the exception of Chernobyl, there simply have not been many adverse effects from nuclear power. Compare that to all the deaths from coal mining and oil exploration, gas leaks in houses, accidents transporting oil and gasoline, premature deaths from asthma exacerbated by air pollution, etc.
People opposing nuclear power twist the truth every bit as much as Palin did about healthcare. It’s shameful. Let’s at least have a reasoned debate.