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| President Obama shows the way |
No, it wasn't a great speech, but how can any political speech about a disaster, a man-made disaster as was the BP Oil Spill, be a great speech. It's impossible. After all, America wasn't attacked by aliens as in Independence Day.
Of course, all that escaped The Huffington Post, where blogger Jason Linkins produced a long, ramblings, non-sensical blog post designed purely to hammer President Obama and nothing else. How else to explain a blog post that reads as if Linkins didn't listen to Obama's speech and instead smoked a bong?
Linkins wrote "And yet, basically what we got, in spades, was sentiment."
Spades? Thank God Jason didn't drop the "s", otherwise he would have had a real problem. But it shows just how sloppy Linkins was in his presentation created for many to see.
I heard Obama present a plan which in part explained what had been done:
Tonight I'd like to lay out for you what our battle plan is going forward: what we're doing to clean up the oil, what we're doing to help our neighbors in the Gulf, and what we're doing to make sure that a catastrophe like this never happens again.
First, the cleanup. From the very beginning of this crisis, the federal government has been in charge of the largest environmental cleanup effort in our nation's history - an effort led by Admiral Thad Allen, who has almost forty years of experience responding to disasters. We now have nearly 30,000 personnel who are working across four states to contain and cleanup the oil. Thousands of ships and other vessels are responding in the Gulf. And I have authorized the deployment of over 17,000 National Guard members along the coast. These servicemen and women are ready to help stop the oil from coming ashore, clean beaches, train response workers, or even help with processing claims - and I urge the governors in the affected states to activate these troops as soon as possible.
And what is going to be done.
Obama mentioned the formation of "The Gulf Coast Restoration Plan," something Linkins didn't even pay attention to it would seem. Obama was honest in stating essentially that the BP Oil Spill caught America off guard and it's rushing to catch up as the disaster gets even worse. I got that and did not expect a full battle plan ready to go, because there's so much we're learning as it happens, and a lot has happened in a very short period of time.
Hindsight is 20-20, but the proof that Linkins is just plain dead wrong is in the simple fact that he does not present an alternative speech himself. It's as if Linkins saw the negative Twitter tweets and elected to play to that crowd of mobsters. It's always easy to play to the crowd. The hardest action is to take a stand and go against it.
The Huffington Post forgets that the main act of a presidential speech is to give direction to the country. Obama did just that.
