Snakes in the Oval!

"Folks are waiting for a Samuel Jackson 'Snakes on the Plane' moment from this president as in: 'We gotta' get this $#@!!* oil back in the $#!!* rig!' But that's just not who Obama is,'' says Saladin Ambar, a political science professor at Lehigh University in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania.

One thing that's funny about the whole "Obama needs to get pissed!" nonsense is that it infers that for some reason BP is just milling around, not really paying attention to or caring how quickly the leak stops. Like if Obama bursts into the room all of a sudden they're gonna snap to! and flip a few switches.

These are people who cut corners ensuring that people were killed in order to increase profits. These are people who spend more money lobbying for deregulation that allows for such things than you and I will see in a lifetime. The profits they got in exchange for getting fines they didn't give two shits about is, I'm "guessing," quite tantalizing.

But having thousands of gallons of oil shoot into the ocean DOESN'T make these people any money; in fact, it's COSTING them money. So if they could stop it, they would. The idea that the CEO of BP gives two shits about how mean Obama might be if he comes by the office is laughable.

The "genius" of the free market is that pure greed would never allow something like this to happen. But when you have people in government bending over backwards to make sure these people have nothing and nobody to answer to, such "genius" gets watered down and forgets how important keeping itself in check really is, and here we are. The oil companies are like the kid who could go to college for a year or two, mature a bit and then spend 15 years in the NBA making $100M but instead is told how awesome he is from the age of 7, comes outta AAU, has his posse as his "business advisors," refuses to be coached, tells the Lakers to go fuck themselves and then finds himself broke and out of basketball after 4 years.

Except, of course, by this time next year BP will be back to business as usual, deregulated as ever. Like I told Marley, I'm just waiting for the perfect time to buy BP stock now. Drill, baby, drill!

UPDATE 3:57PM: actually the analogy would be truer if the AAU kid makes 10x the college guy, is constantly in trouble with the league, wins a ring every year but completely destroys the NBA, who til the bitter end enables him in every way.