Douchebag of the Decade

If Dick Cheney shot the entire Gulf Coast populace in the face with buckshot it would have been better than this mess.

What more can you call the guy? Oily Dick?

@ManchuCandidate: Satan’s Bride.

@ManchuCandidate: And I wonder – all these shrimpers and fishermen who are bitching? If they voted for Bush/Cheney, they brought this on themselves. They’ll never figure that out, of course, but there it is.

@ManchuCandidate: As Michael Feldman pointed out on “Whaddaya Know?” yesterday, when you install a toilet you are required to put in a cut off valve. Oil wells? Not so much.

@Mistress Cynica: The plumbers don’t have the lobbyist that big oil does.

@blogenfreude:
Many do have a habit of voting against their best interests, but I still feel bad that they just lost their lively hoods because of the spill.

@ManchuCandidate: I do as well. But at some point, it has to be made clear to these people that voting stupid will result in economic loss, destruction, and death. Perhaps theirs. Ask those rig workers …

@ManchuCandidate: @blogenfreude: I feel bad for them, too, and the horrible thing is they’ll never see the correlation between the choices they voted for and the outcome we see now, and they certainly won’t take “personal responsibility” for it. I look forward to seeing them at future teabagger rallies protesting the high taxes that will be required to pay for the federal disaster relief that, IMO, they still deserve.
I would be interested to see the stats on how many of the world’s major oil spills have occurred off the shores of the US and other unregulated third world countries as opposed to in the North Sea and other socialist controlled areas. Dodger, you guys got anything?

@Mistress Cynica: I was reading something by a Famous Economist last night who pointed out (again) that the U.S. financial system remained calm for decades because of regulation, and immediately went bonkers following deregulation.

Oddly enough, he didn’t recommend just putting the fucking regulations back in place.

In many cases, solutions are easy. But we prefer to pretend otherwise.

@nojo: Exactly. If everyone is so enamored of the Age of Reagan – just shift all the financial services regulations back to the way they were in 1982. Done.

@FlyingChainSaw: The deregulators are sociopaths – and yes, I know I use the word a lot. But conspiring to hurt ordinary people at the expense of their “betters” is straight up antisocial.

@Mistress Cynica: My sense is that it’s more of a numbers game. The more rigs you have, the more shipping, the more likely it is for something to go wrong. Y’know, if the Exxon Valdez had had a double hull, it wouldn’t have made a goddam bit of difference. The good Capt was below deck and an unlicensed 3rd mate was at the wheel, trying to steer that thing through a lane that had narrowed to 1 mile because of icebergs. Even with two hulls, something with that much inertia hits solid rock, it’s going to get opened up like a sardine can.

@Dodgerblue: You touch on something which I beleive is a disconnect on the idea of causation and fault, its a deeply embedded problem in our legal system.

You are completely correct, its a numbers game. There are certain human activities which entail risk, no matter how much care and caution is put into it, there will be a failure, its simply impossible to make the works and actions of human beings perfect, and if you undertake a risky endeavour, there will be accidents, and they will occur, at a certain statistical rate, you can alter the rate, with regulation, mandated safety measures, but you are just tinkering with the rate, changing the risk probability, you can never eliminate the risk.

But when the inevitable happens, our legal system hunts down the tired mechanic who forgot a bolt and blames it on him. Thats scapegoating, in these cases, the risk was knowingly accepted when it was decided to engage in the activity.

Are you familiar with Ambrose Bierce’s definition of an “accident,” from the “Devil’s Dictionary?”