President Obama's BP Shakedown

By: David Limbaugh

President Obama's oil spill speech revealed, once again, how stunningly shameless he is. This relentless ideologue is not even marginally competent at masking his ongoing crusade to apply a wrecking ball to every sector of our economy and remake it in his own image.

And I do mean "his" own image. Once again, his speech was loaded with first-person references, from "I refuse to let (Gulf Coast residents lose their way of life)" to "I expect (the new commission tasked with determining the cause of the explosion) to do that work thoroughly and impartially" to "I am happy to look at other ideas and approaches from either party." More on that last howler in a moment.

Obama's MO is so predictable that sophisticated practitioners of Marxist transformation should be embarrassed. Then again, Obama doesn't need to be subtle; he is the president — a president who rejects the constitutional limitations that applied to his mortal predecessors.

After sitting on his hands for months, he comes out rhetorically swinging with both barrels of his teleprompter blazing. First, declare a crisis — meticulously distorting the facts, especially those relative to what caused the crisis.

Second, isolate a scapegoat (along with the awful, resource-exploiting, oil-inhaling, pre-Obama America) to be demonized and bullied into conspiring with him to launch his transformational solution — a solution that has nothing to do with solving the "crisis." In the meantime, shield the true culprits from any blame.

Third, unveil his grandiose plan for salvation by the federal government, provided it first acquires structurally new powers. All the while, he not only downplays the government's culpability in all of this but also overstates its (and his) response to date.

A returning space traveler watching his speech would have assumed Obama actually had been "kicking tail" throughout this "crisis" instead of partying and playing golf. Upon watching the speech, the traveler would not have experienced the megadoses of deja vu felt by the rest of us, who had watched this movie — starring this very president — many times before.

To be sure, the oil spill has been terrible, and BP doubtlessly bears much blame. But do any of us know all the facts? Should the president be unilaterally declaring BP's strict liability as if he were the final judge, jury, and executioner — without even affording the company any opportunity to defend itself?

Alinsky-starved radicals might find it gratifying for a dictatorial president to beat up on such an evil agent of capitalism, but some of us find his approach unseemly and disturbing. Besides denying the company any semblance of due process and fairness, how about his habitual expenditure of negative energy — pointing fingers — instead of employing a constructive approach?

No matter how culpable BP ultimately is determined to be, Obama's bullying should not deflect our attention from another culprit here: environmental extremists.

Just as Obama blamed Wall Street and exempted government (liberal policies) and quasi-government entities (Freddie and Fannie) for their complicity in the financial meltdown and just as he blamed doctors, pharmaceuticals, and insurance companies for soaring healthcare costs caused mostly by socialistic governmental policies, he is summarily blaming BP and exempting unreasonable liberal environmental policies for shutting down more conventional and safer drilling methods — and venues.

As usual, Obama and his ilk greatly contribute to problems and then use those problems as catalysts to justify even greater doses of their destructive socialistic prescriptions. It's maddening.

Just as Obama browbeat and bought off the American Medical Association and big pharma to go along with Obamacare, he summoned BP executives to his office. Flanked by Attorney General Eric Holder, who has threatened criminal action against BP, he shook down BP into forking over a $20 billion installment to defer the government's further wrath.

BP is but another prop Obama has chosen to advance another plank of his statist agenda — this time his plan to shut down our conventional energy industry in favor of new, quixotic alternative energy methods that will succeed only in propelling this nation even faster toward Third World status.

I'm surprised Obama didn't give another "shout-out" to "Joe Medicine Crow" as he began his speech designed to pretend he cares about the victims of the oil spill (even his lib media enablers aren't buying it this time) — for the sole purpose of passing cap and trade on their backs. Cap and trade has already failed, but so had healthcare before he finally crammed it through.

Just as Obama fraudulently promised to listen to Republican ideas at his bogus healthcare summit after he'd shut them out of the process from the beginning, he promised to "look at other ideas and approaches from either party" on his cap-and-trade fiasco.

Oh, yes, he's all about considering the ideas of others and the will of the American people. And I'm all about advancing liberalism. LOL.