“And up through the ground came a bubblin’ crude. Oil that is, black gold, Texas tea.”

Well, they’re really swimming in it in the Gulf. It’s a mess, for sure.

Fifty-plus days of oil bubbling up from a mile below the water’s surface and we still don’t have a good handle on the situation.

The Obama White House has been almost schizophrenic in its approach. One day the President is saying that the “buck” stops with him. The next he says he’s looking for someone’s (presumably not his own) butt to kick.

One day his administration is adamant that they’re keeping the “boot” to the neck of British Petroleum (BP). Then another day when our own Senator Richard Burr asked Interior Secretary Ken Salazar whether BP had ever refused to do anything the government requested, Secretary Salazar admitted that BP had done everything the government asked.

It seems that it’s going to take something more than the soaring rhetoric of hope and change to handle this crisis. Sweet words and rhythmic cadence won’t plug the hole, unfortunately.

Times like this you wish we had elected someone who had some – any sort – of management experience. Where the job application for President reads, “Experience helpful, but not required,” we might want to change that a little bit.

What can we learn from the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico? For starters, we know there’s oil down there. Plenty of it.

The next time you hear someone whining about how we’re running out of oil, just send them to the beaches along the Gulf coast and let them collect some tar balls. The oil is there.

This oil spill can also teach us several lessons about life and about the effectiveness of government. Chief among these lessons is that accidents happen.

We can hate on BP all we want, but the bottom line is that this spill is affecting BP’s bottom line. BP didn’t set out one day to destroy the Gulf of Mexico. The legal and financial liability would have been, and is, such that it could destroy the company.

You can’t plan for every conceivable contingency. You can’t have a regulation or an inspection to prevent every accident. The costs of doing so would bring industry and innovation to a screeching halt.

Now, granted the cocaine fueled orgies the Mineral Management Service (MMS) – the agency in charge of regulating the oil industry – was having with oil industry employees, and the gifts the MMS was accepting from big oil isn’t good for public perception.

Maybe better inspections would have prevented the deadly accident in the first place. Maybe not. But it was already in BP’s financial interest to maintain a safe, leak-free rig. It’s hard to imagine what regulations would have been more persuasive than the almighty dollar already was.

The whole episode also nicely illustrates the limited ability of the government. The President commands very little authority a mile beneath the ocean. Perhaps if the government would allow drilling in shallower waters BP and other companies wouldn’t be forced to drill in the more dangerous mile deep waters.

The President, chained down by his far left ideology, is bound by the notion that the government can be all things to all people and tackle any and every problem that comes our way. It would be nice if it was true, but it’s not.

Government has enough trouble performing its legitimate functions like maintaining law and order, waging war, securing the borders and all that jazz.

Just last week, for instance, there was a stabbing at a convenience store a mere block away from the Asheboro Police Department. It’s not a fault of the police that this happened. But it just goes to show how little can be done to prevent even relatively simple, although dangerous, incidents.

But yet the President suffers from what I’ve heard referred to as “lawyers’ disease.” This is the idea that any problem can be fixed by passing a new law or a rule or regulation. Perhaps we need to pass a law banning leaking oil pipes! Or a law requiring BP to fix the mess! Why hasn’t anyone come up with this before? I wonder.

There are things beyond our control. There are a few things for which even George W. Bush can’t be blamed. Although rumor has it a close friend of Al and Tipper Gore credits Bush’s 2000 win over Gore as the cause of the Gores’ separation and coming divorce.

For weeks, maybe months, you’ll hear politicians on Capitol Hill lambasting BP and oil executives in public hearings, much the same way they did Toyota executives this spring. Before Toyota it was the bank CEOs.

Whatever happened to them, by the way? Don’t our lawmakers care about faulty brakes or greedy CEOs anymore? Or perhaps they didn’t really care in the first place. BP is a bigger fish to fry now.

You can’t blame the President for this accident. But he can be blamed for his lax response. The government ought to be good at this sort of thing. But instead massive federal bureaucracy and red tape are hindering cleanup efforts and tying Louisiana’s hands from protecting its own coast.

So let’s stop fooling around with running car companies and mega mortgage giants like Freddie and Fannie Mae. Let’s get back to the basics, like protecting the Gulf coast and see if we can’t get that right before it’s too late.



Tar Heel Dispatch is written by Tyler Younts, a second-year law student at Campbell University. Younts, who grew up in Farmer, has a passion for writing and for politics and for writing about politics. E-mail comments to news@randolphguide.com or directly to Younts at tlyounts0209@email.campbell.edu