Obama Encourages State Of Denial About Offshore Drilling Dangers

Last year saw the biggest environmental disaster in the history of the United States of America – the oil spill set loose by the fatal explosion and sinking of the Deepwater Horizon offshore drilling platform. If you only had Barack Obama’s State of the Union Address to judge the last year, however, you would think that the Gulf of Mexico calamity had never happened.

More people were killed in the explosion of the Deepwater Horizon than were killed in the attack by Jared Lee Loughner against Gabrielle Giffords. However, though Gabrielle Giffords was given special mention in the State of the Union Address last night, the Deepwater Horizon oil spill was not mentioned at all.

President Obama didn’t ever speak of the rig that exploded, or of the problems with offshore drilling. He didn’t mention the economic devastation suffered by states bordering the Gulf of Mexico. He didn’t mention the tar balls that are still washing up on Gulf beaches. He didn’t mention the huge amount of toxic petroleum that’s still in the waters of the Gulf, nor the hazardous dispersants that were sprayed out in huge amounts. Heck, Obama didn’t mention any kind of pollution at all.

This wasn’t a State of the Union Address. It was a State of Denial Address.

Barack Obama was asking us to go along with his distraction last night, and pretend that the Deepwater Horizon oil spill wasn’t a significant part of the state of the nation in 2010. He’s asking us to pretend, as we did before Earth Day 2010, that oil spills aren’t a big problem.

It’s no wonder, given that President Obama gave the go ahead to continue dangerous deep water offshore drilling without any significant reforms, before the report of the commission on the oil spill was even released, much less acted upon.

Barack Obama, awkwardly, as tried to sweep the Gulf of Mexico oil spill under the rug. He ought to remember, though, that what gets swept under the rug doesn’t go away. It stays there, moldering, until it begins to put out a rotten stench that no one can deny.