'GEOLOGICAL MONSTER'

On Monday, former President Bill Clinton said: " The failed well is a "geological monster" and if efforts to cap the leak should fail, the U.S. Navy might have to blow it up. Asked if he was concerned that the two relief wells currently being drilled may not work, Clinton said "yeah" and added that blowing up the well "may become necessary."

"The navy could probably stop it, but there are all kinds of consequences that would have to be considered," Clinton said. "You could stop that well, but what else might you do that might upset the ecostructure of the Gulf?" The navy may not need to use a nuclear weapon, explaining that the navy could simply "blow up the well and cover the leak with piles and piles and piles of rock and debris."

At best, if the Navy were to blow up the well, the flow would be stopped and long-term cleanup could progress toward an endgame. At worst, the explosion could punch a much larger hole, and increase the oil flow far beyond any hope of ever stopping it.

The parallels between Chernobyl and the Gulf oil spill are striking. A belief in the omnipotence of government, as well as an all powerful bureaucracy is a recipe for disaster. Problem solvers are shunted aside while politicos seek how best “not to let a crisis go to waste”. Watch for a greater effort to push cap and trade. And while many argue that Chernobyl helped hasten the demise of the USSR, hopefully the demise of this incompetent administration will be not far off.

The calamity in the Gulf has the markings of the disaster that led to the demise of the Soviet Union. Our federal government led by our god-like president, an omnipotent structure in the starry eyes of many, shows itself to be an incompetent, uncoordinated monster, capable only of interfering with productive efforts to salvage our coastlines and livelihoods. The once-Olympian Obama is reduced to a sniveling nebbish bemoaning his inability to suck it all up with a straw.

With the kind of luck that used to be credited with accompanying fools and drunks, America is getting an object lesson in the stupidity of believing in an all-knowing state-god. As the horror goes on, this lesson, if learned, could last generations, and it arrives as we begin our final descent into serfdom.

While Obama turned the American drift to tyranny into a sprint, he’s managed a spectacular slip-and-fall on the way to our transformation. His actions and those of his government are not substantially different from any other bureaucracy, Soviet or not. The results in all their hideousness are undeniably clear. Like Chernobyl, they will be with us for a long time.

As Chernobyl was a turning point in the mind of the average Soviet, the Gulf drama demonstrates the same weaknesses and follies of any centralized political command and control system. Like good Soviets, no one at the federal level, especially our leader, is proposing a solution to the leak. Rather, the federal response is absorbed in turf wars, leaving coherent action paralyzed by conflicting loyalties.

We watch the Corps of Engineers frustrate the Coast Guard, while both join the rest of the federal apparatus to frustrate problem-solvers. From rejecting foreign government help to ignoring good old boys with hay bales, the problem for the feds is not how to stop the leak, or even how to mitigate the disaster, but how best to exploit it to the advantage of politicians and their sponsors.