View From Here: Terror in the Gulf

The oil gushing from a well a mile underwater is the result of  an amazing feat of engineering that private industry has achieved and only they have the engineering technology, robotic submersibles working at the drill head and controlled from a room in Houston, Texas for one example, to even begin to stop it.   The Obama Administration has very smart people giving advice and support as they work their way through the unique and “unprepared for” engineering predicament their expertise and technological hubris has led to.
This piercing of the earth and continuing another 35,000ft. through rock to tap a toxic substance that Mother Nature surely thought she had safely tucked away, has allowed us to see oil in its purest form-as a destroyer of life.  It is akin to an underwater radioactive bomb, destroying life throughout the water column and a way of life all along the coastline. 
We see independent reports with estimates ranging between 25,000-90,000 barrels of oil a day being released and spewing into the Gulf.  Much of it is being dispersed into droplets too small to see, too small to rise to the top but able to be caught in ocean currents fouling life cycles from plankton to people and from the wetlands of Louisiana on to Florida and possibly around and up the East Coast.
President Obama has to bring a full light on the situation in the form of an official revision upward of the estimate of the gusher and a radical recalibration in the level of his response such that the perception of government is changed.   If current efforts, what the industry calls a “top kill” fail to stop the discharge, Obama can keep his cool but he’ll have to do it at a Joint Chiefs of Staff meeting where they treat the Gulf Coast as a third front for all appropriate resources.  Have Drones monitor the oil above and below the surface and put the images on YouTube. Break protocol on nuclear subs and announce there’s one in the area full of scientists.  Call in the Marines.  Have troop trucks on the highways headed for the coast.  Show them marching down to the shoreline with shovels, oil-absorbent material and buckets of Dawn.  Let the debate be if the administration went “over the top” in its response to protecting the coastline and the nation’s security.  Less than that and the possibility exists that Obama will spend the rest of his presidency in explanations instead of cheers.