Jim Hightower: The Right-Wing Loons Should Stop Blaming "God" for the Oil Spill

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AlterNet / By Jim Hightower

Hightower: The Right-Wing Loons Should Stop Blaming "God" for the Oil Spill
It wasn't God whose insatiable thirst for profit put a risky oil-pumping contraption afloat on mile-deep water. BP executives did that.

May 12, 2010 |


Luckily, as our country tries to cope with another oozing oil disaster, we have political leaders with the insight, expertise and cool heads to analyze the problem precisely and guide us to rational long-term solutions. For example, Gov. Rick Perry of Texas.

Known as the Sage of Paint Creek, Texas, this towering intellect was among the right-wing politicos who were noisily demanding deregulation of all offshore drilling only two years ago, chanting "Drill, baby, drill!"

Now, even though BP's offshore rig, Deepwater Horizon, has created an ecological catastrophe in the Gulf of Mexico, Perry is still defending the industry's always-messy practice of extracting ever-more crude from the Earth's depths. The culprit in this disaster, explained the guv, is not BP but the Almighty. "From time to time," he informs us, "there's going to be things that occur that are acts of God that cannot be prevented."

Hmmm. So, God is the one who exploded BP's rig, killed 11 workers, shut down the livelihoods of countless Gulf fishing families and spread a deadly, still-gushing slick of oil across four states. Wow, that's one mean God!

But wait -- it wasn't God whose insatiable thirst for profit put a risky oil-pumping contraption afloat on mile-deep water and sank a pipe 4 miles into the Gulf floor. BP executives did that. And they also were the ones who decreed from on high that there was only a one-in-a-million chance of anything going wrong. Scoffing at all who objected, they pointed out that Deepwater Horizon was a state-of-the-art rig. Perfectly safe, they crowed. Trust us. ..........(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.alternet.org/story/146830/hightower%3A_the_right-wing_loons_should_stop_blaming_%22god%22_for_the_oil_spill/