ReetzAlity.com

I’m no genius, but President Obama’s speech was shallow rhetoric, self aggrandizing bunk, and replete with the indicia of an incapable leader. It came across as a joke, but under the circumstances, it’s not funny. Let’s go through the rhetoric and analyze. Don’t get depressed. The first step in solving a problem is admitting you have a problem. We have a problem, it’s Obama. He’s helping us admit it. Here’s my analysis:

First comment of concern by our President and analysis:

Obama: “That is why just after the rig sank, I assembled a team of our nation’s best scientists and engineers to tackle this challenge – a team led by Dr. Steven Chu, a Nobel Prize-winning physicist and our nation’s Secretary of Energy.”

Reetzality: No you did not assemble a team just after the rig sank. And I don’t care about Nobel prizes. I care about results. After all, our President got one of those Nobel Prizes.

Second comment of concern by our Presidetn and analysis:

Obama: “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.”

Reetzality: Thad Allen was appointed on May 1, 2010, ten days after the oil spill. Today he stated that he reports to the Secretary of Homeland Security, Janet Napolitano, not to the president. The federal government has not been in charge of the largest environmental clean up since the very beginning, in fact, it is possible they are not in charge of it now.

Obama: “Tomorrow, I will meet with the chairman of BP and inform him that he is to set aside whatever resources are required to compensate the workers and business owners who have been harmed as a result of his company’s recklessness. And this fund will not be controlled by BP. In order to ensure that all legitimate claims are paid out in a fair and timely manner, the account must and will be administered by an independent, third party.”

Reetzality: Tomorrow? Eight weeks later he’s meeting with the chairman of BP? This is being Johnny on the spot to fix the problem? Not in my book. And where is authority to order a corporation to “set aside” funds? What about due process? What about liability? I know, it looks and most likely is BP’s fault, but we don’t know for sure yet. To announce that he’s ordering them to “set aside” without stating the mechanism which is going to do this reveals his ignorance of the constitution or his reliance on his perceived stupidity of Americans. But he gets right past those tedious constitutional issues and goes right into management, an independent third party, of the fund that we, nor he, has any clue how he’s going to order to be set aside.

Obama: “The oil spill represents just the latest blow to a place that has already suffered multiple economic disasters and decades of environmental degradation that has led to disappearing wetlands and habitats. And the region still hasn’t recovered from Hurricanes Katrina and Rita.”

Reetzality: There’s the blame Bush game. There’s the, “The Gulf is trashed but it’s not my fault entirely. Bush has to take some blame because he screwed up Katrina and Rita.”

Obama: “Already, I have issued a six-month moratorium on deepwater drilling. I know this creates difficulty for the people who work on these rigs, but for the sake of their safety, and for the sake of the entire region, we need to know the facts before we allow deepwater drilling to continue.”

Reetzality: Why six months? Why not a decade? Why not two months? Creates difficulty? Six months was an arbitrary time limit plucked out of the air. It has no basis in any analysis as to how long it would actually take. If you were in a meeting and somebody said, “six months,” you’d ask, “why six months? What’s your basis for needing six months?” For God’s sake, he’s the federal government, does it really take six months to “know the facts?” Maybe it does for the federal government. Me personally, I’d get you the facts in a week for a million dollars with a $200,000.00 operating budget, and I’m nothing special. I do agree that the loss of a job is a difficulty, maybe even a financial crisis for a family person supporting his or her family.

Obama: “. . . the Minerals Management Service. Over the last decade, this agency has become emblematic of a failed philosophy that views all regulation with hostility – a philosophy that says corporations should be allowed to play by their own rules and police themselves. At this agency, industry insiders were put in charge of industry oversight. Oil companies showered regulators with gifts and favors, and were essentially allowed to conduct their own safety inspections and write their own regulations.”

Reetzality: “Over the last decade . . . “ More of the blame game. As to industry insiders, our man, President Obama hired Elizabeth Birnbaum who formerly worked for BP. She resigned, effective May 31st, 2010. Yes, maybe insiders were put in charge, but our President hired the insiders.

Obama: “After all, oil is a finite resource. We consume more than 20% of the world’s oil, but have less than 2% of the world’s oil reserves. And that’s part of the reason oil companies are drilling a mile beneath the surface of the ocean – because we’re running out of places to drill on land and in shallow water.”

Reetzality: That’s not true. Regardless of the percentages, we have oil. How about drilling in ANWAR where we would have plugged the hole already. How about the East and West coast? How about the Dakotas? We’re running out of places to drill because the government is preventing us from drilling.

Obama: “Countries like China are investing in clean energy jobs and industries that should be here in America.”

Reetzality: You’ve got to be kidding. Our President has just called us, implicit in the above comment, retarded. Does anybody recall the air pollution concerns of the last Olympics? Does anybody, I mean anybody, believe that China, China for Heaven’s sake, is going green? They’re not. Shame on you Mr. President.

Obama: “This is not some distant vision for America. The transition away from fossil fuels will take some time, but over the last year and a half, we have already taken unprecedented action to jumpstart the clean energy industry. As we speak, old factories are reopening to produce wind turbines, people are going back to work installing energy-efficient windows, and small businesses are making solar panels. Consumers are buying more efficient cars and trucks, and families are making their homes more energy-efficient. Scientists and researchers are discovering clean energy technologies that will someday lead to entire new industries.”

Reetzality: This is classic liberal argument number one! Change the subject. The issue is the oil spill and plugging the hole and what does our President do? He changes the subject and speaks of Green. Not now Mr. President, you have a leak to plug. Go Green in your nearing retirement. See Al Gore.

Obama: “When I was a candidate for this office, I laid out a set of principles that would move our country towards energy independence. Last year, the House of Representatives acted on these principles by passing a strong and comprehensive energy and climate bill – a bill that finally makes clean energy the profitable kind of energy for America’s businesses.”

Reetzality: What are those “principles that would move our country towards energy independence?” This is classic, “let no crisis go to waste” speak. Bad President, bad.

Obama: “The one answer I will not settle for is the idea that this challenge is too big and too difficult to meet. You see, the same thing was said about our ability to produce enough planes and tanks in World War II. The same thing was said about our ability to harness the science and technology to land a man safely on the surface of the moon.”

Reetzality: First, the challenge is too big for you Mr. President. After all, how did you fare in that lemonade stand? Oops, you never ran a lemonade stand, or anything bigger. And the nerve of you to invoke World War II and the man on the moon. Those were real American challenges and if the truth be told, which I always do, (I’m not smart enough to lie) your rhetoric tonight would have us speaking German or, in the case of a man on the moon, have us still attempting. To the extent you are correct in your reaching analogy, you don’t have the hutzpah to be the guy in charge.

O.K. Now for the Reetzality recap. The president has lied about his efforts, his priority, and his diligence in dealing with the Gulf Oil spill. He has used the Gulf Oil Spill to leverage his bigger agenda, government growth and control. He is not equipped to deal with this crisis. He has absolutely no experience or history that would avail him of the ammunition to deal with this problem. He is flailing. Certainly, his words sound good but the merits of them, the meaning of his words, are troubling for their vacancy of significance. Even more problematic, he has yet to formulate a plan. He has delivered nothing more than shallow rhetoric that works just fine in the south side of Chicago and evidently in a presidential campaign, but when push comes to shove, doesn’t plug the hole.

Folks, I do not fault our President for who he is. He is a product of an enabled rearing where he was indulged. He was indulged as a youth. He was indulged with his admittance into the Universities he attended. He was indulged with his position as a constitutional law professor at the University of Chicago. He was indulged with his state legislative seat. He was indulged with his senate position. He was ultimately indulged with the Presidency. We, as a people, indulged him. We were serenaded by the tempo of his words and now he is President, with no experience in dealing with crisis, accountability or consequence, and our Gulf Coast is suffering as we will all suffer.

This is the revelation. This is the time, the moment, when our leader has revealed himself as a non-leader. This is the moment when the truth is revealed that our President is nothing more than a simple tele-prompter reader with no ability to deal with crisis. This is the time when we realize that our President is incapable, lacking the most important quality we need in a President, the ability to problem solve. He is vacant of the skills and strengths are country needs and demands.

And that’s my Reetzality for the Day.

Thanks for the read.

Brett Reetz