American Chernobyl

Perhaps people will finally catch on to the fact that the government is little more than a gigantic resource-sucking waste of human capital, little more than a bunch of parasitic apparatchiks who add nothing whatsoever to the wealth of the nation.

American Thinker:

The calamity in the Gulf has the markings of the disaster that led to the demise of the Soviet Union. Our federal government led by our god-like president, an omnipotent structure in the starry eyes of many, shows itself to be an incompetent, uncoordinated monster, capable only of interfering with productive efforts to salvage our coastlines and livelihoods. The once-Olympian Obama is reduced to a sniveling nebbish bemoaning his inability to suck it all up with a straw.

The whole spectacle is too familiar to anyone who's ever tried to develop a productive enterprise. Such people see the same bureaucratic nonsense devised by lawyers to frustrate creativity and strengthen the government's grip on the citizen. From building permits to oil drilling, the motivation for the rules is always wrapped in some noble-sounding, abstract notion. The execution is inevitably callous, mindless, and ruthless. Too often, it's also corrupt.

With the kind of luck that used to be credited with accompanying fools and drunks, America is getting an object lesson in the stupidity of believing in an all-knowing state-god. As the horror goes on, this lesson, if learned, could last generations, and it arrives as we begin our final descent into serfdom.

While Obama turned the American drift to tyranny into a sprint, he's managed a spectacular slip-and-fall on the way to our transformation. His actions and those of his government are not substantially different from any other bureaucracy, Soviet or not. The results in all their hideousness are undeniably clear. Like Chernobyl, they will be with us for a long time.

As Chernobyl was a turning point in the mind of the average Soviet, the Gulf drama demonstrates the same weaknesses and follies of any centralized political command and control system. Like good Soviets, no one at the federal level, especially our leader, is proposing a solution to the leak. Rather, the federal response is absorbed in turf wars, leaving coherent action paralyzed by conflicting loyalties.

We watch the Corps of Engineers frustrate the Coast Guard, while both join the rest of the federal apparatus to frustrate problem-solvers. From rejecting foreign government help to ignoring good old boys with hay bales, the problem for the feds is not how to stop the leak, or even how to mitigate the disaster, but how best to exploit it to the advantage of politicians and their sponsors.

In the best tradition of ambulance-chasers running to the scene of a multi-car wreck, our president has no first aid skills and no desire to dirty his hands pulling victims from the wreckage. The only action he's capable of is pounding his chest and demanding that someone else pay.

Of course Obama's compassion is delivered on a contingency basis. The fee in this case is further crippling the American economy with his energy fantasies.

This is Chernobyl with an American spin.

The Soviet people lost their fear of the system as a result of Chernobyl. The nuclear disaster planted the seeds that quickly sprouted into the collapse of the Berlin Wall and the totalitarian governments that built it. America's flirtation with tyranny developed into a betrothal with Obama's accession. Will we have the sense Russians did to realize our state-god has clay feet? Can we leave him standing at the altar?

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