Republican hypocrisy and the Gulf oil disaster

By Michael J.W. Stickings

It's hilarious -- isn't it? -- that Republican senators like Mitch McConnell and David Vitter, eager as always to score cheap political points even at the cost of exposing their raging hypocrisy, are criticizing President Obama's handling of the Gulf oil spill. Like most in their party, after all, these are conservatives who think that government should exist solely to bomb foreign peoples (and, these days, preferably Muslim ones) into submission, pay out huge sums of corporate welfare, and legislate sexual morality, certainly not to clean up the environment. Indeed, it's precisely the anti-regulatory conservatism of Republicans, and specifically of the Bush administration, which made policy based on what was good for Halliburton and ExxonMobil, not on what was good for the country, let alone the environment, that created the culture of profit-above-all-else irresponsibility that allowed the Gulf oil spill to happen in the first place.

And apparently these Republicans think Obama is Superman -- and that he can do whatever he wants, that his will is supreme, and that he doesn't face Republican obstructionism at every turn.

But what else should we expect? It's just the same old bullshit from the same old bullshitters.