Congressman Ted Poe is a reliable source of American manufacturing. He specializes in manufacturing particularly pure and concentrated formulations of nonsense. This week, Poe offers us his own very peculiar brand of outrage about the disaster in the Gulf of Mexico. Ted Poe gave a speech in Congress which he began by with the statement, “The moratorium on deepwater offshore drilling will prevent drilling in the Gulf of Mexico for the next 6 months or longer. Why do we have the moratorium? What is the purpose? When we have a plane crash, as disastrous as that might be, we don’t close down the entire airline industry for 6 months – that wouldn’t make sense – but now we want to close down the drilling offshore for 6 months.”
It’s important to understand what Ted Poe is talking about when he speaks of a “moratorium”. It’s not permanent, as many say it ought to be. It’s for only half a year. It’s not a ban on offshore drilling. It’s not even a requirement for the cessation of all deepwater activities. It’s only a temporary pause for new “exploratory” offshore drilling in dangerously deep waters in the Gulf of Mexico.
So, the metaphor Ted Poe uses – closing down the entire airline industry because of one plane crash – isn’t apt. A more apt metaphor would be putting a temporary pause on flights of the Space Shuttle fleet after the explosion of the Space Shuttle Columbia. Does Congressman Poe think that was inappropriate?
There’s an important difference that Poe’s metaphor, and even the comparison to the Space Shuttle, misses. When a plane crashes, it can kill the people aboard and create a small area of damage on the ground. The same is true of the Space Shuttle. Neither the crash of an airplane nor of a Space Shuttle would create the worst environmental disaster in U.S. history, shutting down the economy of an entire region, and converting a vast area of American waters into a toxic soup. A plane crash doesn’t create a multi-billion-dollar economic crisis. Not even a Space Shuttle crash could do that. As the wreck of the Deepwater Horizon shows, just one oil rig can easily cause such damage.
Ted Poe is outraged that President Obama is putting a temporary pause on efforts to set up a large number of risky oil rigs like the Deepwater Horizon, without time for an adequate safety review.
Representative Poe went on from there in his speech to declare that the terrible pollution now being witnessed by Gulf Coast residents isn’t the fault of the Deepwater Horizon explosion, isn’t the fault of offshore drilling, and isn’t the fault of BP. Poe says it’s the fault of the federal government.
“There should have been a plan in place immediately to respond. That’s the government’s responsibility,” said Poe. Actually, it was the legal responsibility of BP to have a plan in place. BP said that it had a plan, and that plan turned out to be profoundly inadequate. The government has responsibility in the matter, to be sure, but that responsibility is to ensure that offshore drilling companies have realistic plans to contain catastrophic oil spills – plans that can actually work. The Deepwater Horizon calamity shows that offshore drilling companies have built cleanup plans that rely upon presumptions that range from naive to dishonest to openly preposterous. Yet, Ted Poe is angry that these companies aren’t being allowed to continue with their dirty, dangerous business as usual.
Congressman Poe is willing to pull out any argument to defend the drill baby drill agenda of offshore drilling companies. In doing so, he cares little for consistency. Poe’s main line of argument in his speech this week was that the government wasn’t ready to do enough to stop the spill. It’s with that argument that he began the following statement: “The majority of the pollution is a result of the delay, not of the explosion. I repeat: The majority of the pollution is the result of the delay and not of the explosion itself. Now government is overreacting to the aftermath and making the economic impact worse…”
Notice the shift in premises? First, Poe says that the pollution in the Gulf is because the government wasn’t doing enough. But then, just a few seconds later, Poe accused the government of doing too much – “overreacting”.
Most Americans can see that the government’s actions in the Gulf of Mexico are far from overreaction. If anything, the government needs to act more strongly to contain the spill. If only we weren’t entangled in two wars halfway around the world, the full force of our military could be in the Gulf of Mexico, working to clean up the oil industry’s mess.
We also need our government to restore the generation-long moratorium on expanding areas available to offshore drilling. No one has been able to convincingly establish that this moratorium had any significant negative impact on our nation’s well being, and it’s kept thousands of miles of America’s beach borders safe from devastation of the sort we’re seeing now.
Ted Poe doesn’t see it that way. He wants the government to do both more and less. He says that it’s damaging the economy to seek to avoid the economic devastation caused by the Gulf oil spill.
How does Poe get away with saying crazy stuff like this? We can’t just blame the Republican Party for it. The Democrats down in Texas, where Ted Poe comes from, are equally to blame. This year, the Democratic Party decided it wouldn’t bother even to try to find a candidate to challenge Poe. The Democrats gave up the struggle against Poe’s extremism before the struggle even began.
Given such indifference from Texas Democrats, Ted Poe is free to say whatever nonsense comes to mind, and then to vote accordingly.
this guy is a congressman. he is the government. he , more than likely, would have voted against any government intervention in BP’s business practices. he speaks out of both sides of his mouth. typical republican!
