A Better Use For $20 Billion

Well.  It HAS been a while since anybody's devoted any efforts to exploring the possibility that perhaps it really was the Obama regime that caused Armus.

Oh, don't worry (or cheer up, depending upon your point of view), this isn't from the "King Hussein hired al Qaeda submarines to sabotage the feeder pipe" file.  This CPI report definitely goes in the "mind-boggling incompetence" file.  But in terms of poetic justice, what mind-boggling incompetence it is:

The Coast Guard has gathered evidence it failed to follow its own firefighting policy during the Deepwater Horizon disaster and is investigating whether the chaotic spraying of tons of salt water by private boats contributed to sinking the ill-fated oil rig, according to interviews and documents.

Coast Guard officials told the Center for Public Integrity that the service does not have the expertise to fight an oil rig fire and that its response to the April 20 explosion may have broken the service’s own rules by failing to ensure a firefighting expert supervised the half-dozen private boats that answered the Deepwater Horizon’s distress call to fight the blaze.

An official maritime investigation led by Coast Guard Captain Hung M. Nguyen in New Orleans is examining whether the salt water that was sprayed across the burning platform overran the ballast system that kept the rig upright, changing its weight distribution, and causing it to list....

While investigators have zeroed in on a series of missteps and ignored safety warnings aboard the rig that preceded the fiery explosion April 20, the question of what caused the platform to collapse into the Gulf two days later remains unanswered and could prove vital to ongoing legal proceedings and congressional investigations.

That is because the riser pipe from which the majority of BP’s oil spewed did not start leaking until after the rig sank. Experts and some lawsuits have openly tied the sinking of the drilling vessel to the severity of the leak.

So, to sum it up, the Coast Guard botched its first-response by not bringing in a firefighting expert (from the PRIVATE SECTOR), who would have recommended fire retardant foam instead of really, really, really HEAVY seawater, to put out the rig fire.  All that really, really, really HEAVY seawater is what finally tipped over the rig and broke the pipe.

If it was a case of the CG not following proper procedure, that's only tieable to the White House in the most general sense.  The One calling a presser and pledging to "aggressively reform" the Coast Guard and make sure that those directly responsible will be lashed to lampposts, dipped in pitch, and used as human torches at the next Obama boogie bash would be more than sufficient to paper it over.

But what if a lack of resources figured into this debacle?  That would change the whole equation:

These new details raise serious questions for the White House, which has repeatedly pinned the blame on BP. If it turns out the Coast Guard is at fault — either because it didn’t follow proper procedures or couldn’t respond adequately because of a lack of resources — the public has a right to know why we’re just now learning this information a hundred days after the disaster began.

The crippling budget cuts President Obama proposed for the Coast Guard also deserve a closer examination. Obama’s spending plan reduced the blue water fleet by a full one-third, slashed a thousand personnel, five cutters, and several aircraft, including helicopters. According to the Center for Public Integrity, the Coast Guard updated its official maritime rescue manual — advising against firefighting aboard a rig — just seven months before the Deepwater Horizon explosion. That change in policy came at a time when Admiral Thad Allen warned the budget cuts threatened to turn the Coast Guard into a “hollow force.”

An earlier report from Mehta and Solomon also raised important questions that the White House has yet to answer about what Obama knew when. That investigation revealed the White House timeline of events failed to acknowledge an oil leak until four days after the explosion, even though the Coast Guard’s timeline reported a leak one day after the explosion.

Gee, I don't know the size of the Coast Guard budget (and frankly don't have time to look it up) but I have to think it's a helluva lot less than Hogzilla I was.  So couldn't that relative pittance have been spared to maintain the CG at the peak of readiness and capability?  And ditto, of course, the other branches of the U.S. military, into which the Obamunists lumped them for "cripping cuts".  Cuts not even made to save taxpayer dollars, since we're running up monthly deficits that used to be ANNUAL deficits in the not-too-distant past as it is, but simply because leftwingnuts hate the U.S. military on general priniciples and do not care about all the various and sundry nuances that end up as casualties in the whackety-whack process.

We on the Right look in horror at the erosion of our nuclear and conventional weapons capabilities by the regime, but it's sho-nuff looking like Red Barry's latest exploitable (and self-correcting) crisis was also a product of that ideological malice.  Small wonder that Captain Transparency is silent about it as the tombs of those eleven dead rig workers.

Put THAT on the marquis for next year's Armus hearings.