715 Oil Doesn't Kill People

715 Oil Doesn't Kill People...

People do. You have to understand what's going on in the Gulf of Mexico. There's a big oil spill from an offshore rig run by BP and built in part by Dick Chaney's "former" company, Haliburton. There was an explosion and it killed eleven men on the platform, men whose wives say there was plenty of trouble there before the Big Bang, plenty of warning something awful was about to happen.

But please, you tree hugging environmentalist wackos, this "spill" is enormously beneficial for the United States. BP, the fourth largest corporation on the planet has done you a huge favor, and what's your reaction? You moan and groan about contaminated water, the bumbling efforts to control the outflow (Why control it? It's good for you!) And there are egrets or some other over breeding birds dead, but we have too many of those and the geyser from miles below the surface of the water is serving to thin the flock -- which everyone knows needed thinning.

Then there are the fishermen who say their ability to catch has been hobbled. Nonsense. These guys just don't want to have to clean the oil balls off the bottoms of their boats. Lazy lot, they are.

And the sorry lot of tourist bureaus who say this'll kill the industry. Nonsense. Oil is good for you. Once the weather warms, the tourists will flock to Florida, Alabama, Texas and Louisiana to bathe in the skin-soothing stuff, maybe snitch some samples to put in their cars or to cook.

The unemployment rate in the region soon will plummet. This "disaster" has or will create tens of thousands of "clean up" jobs. And they have to move fast with that, before the hurricane season. Those storms'll blow all that stuff away and everything will be back to normal before they collect more than a couple of paychecks. Or it'll put all the oil on shore where the wages are lower.

This is good for the economy in other ways. For example, it'll make oil a little scarcer raising the price a penny or two at the gas pump and helping civic minded oil companies all over the world and their stockholders and executives to prosper.

So stop maligning BP. They are our ally not our enemy. And while your at it, stop blaming Bush and Cheney. They were long out of office when this all happened. And as Jules Feiffer wrote in the mid 1950s "Big black floating spots are good for you." He was talking about floating air pollution. But floating at sea is just as good.

Shrapnel:

--Okay, grammar police, this is for you. In the sign-off on these posts, should there be a comma between "my" and "but?" Comments welcome.

--In response to a survey, United Airlines has sent a letter of apology. "Sorry for the inconvenience." When are people going to learn the difference between inconvenience and disruption?

--The Wall St. Journal reports that cheetah's like the scent of Calvin Klein scents. Nice to know someone does. But for this we need the WSJ?

I'm Wes Richards. My opinions are my own but you're welcome to them.®

©WJR 2010