How the GOP’s stone age mentality and loyalty to big oil cost them a midterm landslide

On August 7, 2010, Drudge blared: BP OIL LEAK: ‘The Disaster That Never Was.’

That was the crowning moment of a cynical and duplicitous campaign by oil companies and the Obama administration to bury the Deepwater Horizon leak and conceal profound and lasting damage to the Gulf. The motives of the former: money. The motives of the latter: politics.

As early as June, Tim Dickinson at Rolling Stone broke open the story of how the White House had bungled the Gulf spill:

Like the attacks by Al Qaeda, the disaster in the Gulf was preceded by ample warnings – yet the administration had ignored them. Instead of cracking down on MMS, as he had vowed to do even before taking office, Obama left in place many of the top officials who oversaw the agency’s culture of corruption. He permitted it to rubber-stamp dangerous drilling operations by BP – a firm with the worst safety record of any oil company – with virtually no environmental safeguards, using industry-friendly regulations drafted during the Bush years. He calibrated his response to the Gulf spill based on flawed and misleading estimates from BP – and then deployed his top aides to lowball the flow rate at a laughable 5,000 barrels a day, long after the best science made clear this catastrophe would eclipse the Exxon Valdez.

Since then, numerous articles and blog posts have been published chronicling the brazen – and largely successful – effort on the part of BP and the administration to spike the spill. This clip encapsulates much of that reporting:

I started writing about  what I tagged “Gulf Denialism” in August, when it became clear that the mother of all teachable environmental moments was becoming the mother of all transgressions shoved down the memory hole. Here are a few links/excerpts:

August 20:

I can think of few things more irresponsible and reprehensible than gambling with humanity’s future by pretending that our actions have no consequences. This is about the world my daughter will inhabit, so it’s as personal as it gets for me. And it is truly disturbing that rather than use the Gulf calamity as an inflection point and an opportunity to wake the country out of its environmental stupor, a Democratic administration would aid and abet oil companies in ‘disappearing’ the BP spill. It’s obvious why the White House and Democratic leaders don’t want to discuss the dangers and damaging effects of the spill: it’s bad for their electoral prospects in November. How utterly cynical and craven. … If Republicans weren’t in the pocket of oil companies, we’d be seeing the most serious crisis this administration has faced.

September 2:

Apparently the effort to bury the BP disaster hasn’t stopped reality from intervening: “An oil rig has exploded 80 miles off the coast of Louisiana, with 12 people overboard.” Further details: “The platform is owned by Mariner Energy. Many of the crews that responded to the blast are those in the area for the cleanup of the BP oil spill, which followed the explosion of the Deepwater Horizon rig on April 20. According to Mariner Energy’s website, the company engages in deepwater drilling in the gulf, including “higher-risk, high-impact projects that have the potential to create substantial value for our stockholders.” Despite the best efforts to pretend the Deepwater Horizon spill simply vanished, it’s just a matter of time before we face another such calamity. What will it take for us to wake up?

September 12:

This jaw-dropping piece from Fortune, BP walks back its role in the gulf oil spill, should have all Americans steaming mad: “As the last tar balls settle on the bottom of the Gulf, it looks like BP may have some extra cash on hand. The company might not have to pay all of the $20 billion in claims, incoming BP (BP) CEO Bob Dudley told analysts on Monday. This is the latest move in BP’s ongoing effort to back out of the spotlight since the spill.”

September 14:

We live in an age of denial, willfully suffocating the life out of our planet, our only home, while pretending everything will turn out just fine. It is irresponsibility and selfishness on a cosmic scale. The following photo, distributed by Plaquemines Parish President Billy Nungesser is instantly iconic. It depicts a river of dead sea life and it will haunt you after a single glance:

September 17:

As soon as the White House and Democratic leaders conducted polls and focus groups and determined that a continued focus on the aftermath of the Deepwater Horizon catastrophe would harm their electoral prospects, the fate of the spill was sealed. With the help of BP’s massive spin operation, it was shoved down the memory hole so fast that the epic event and surrounding issues didn’t even warrant a mention at President Obama’s recent press conference. The cornerstone of the effort to obliterate the story was a hastily released government report that claimed most of the oil had vanished. That report has now sprung more leaks than the original rig, with numerous indications that the damage to the Gulf is profound and lasting.

In a September 18 post called the Age of Denial, I tried to put Gulf Denialism in a larger context:

America is in an Age of Denial, a time in which intolerable injustices are widely ignored, from preventable hunger, poverty and disease to irreversible environmental destruction to the global oppression of girls and women. It is an age where wealth disparities are at record levels, where a war based on lies and deceptions that resulted in unimaginable carnage is heralded as a success, where the assault on basic rights and liberties is greeted with a yawn — if not a cheer.

It is a time when a minor celebrity infraction receives more attention than an epidemic of sexual violence in which young girls have their insides shredded with broken bottles and sticks of wood, when a sports game arouses more passion and emotion than a million babies dying.

This denialism afflicts the entire nation, not one party, not one particular group, not one ideology.

Many liberals stand by while a Democratic administration affirms and cements the worst excesses and overreaches of George W. Bush and Dick Cheney, authorizing extra-judicial killings, indefinite detention and rendition, among other egregious practices. They stand by as a catastrophic oil spill is purposely scrubbed from public awareness because it has an adverse effect on Democratic electoral prospects. They stand by as the lies and deceptions that led America into Iraq are forgiven and forgotten and the Republican architects and purveyors of those lies are lauded by Democratic leaders. They stand by as obscenely rich bankers are bailed out at the expense of struggling taxpayers.

Conservatives stand by as their leaders callously exploit fear and xenophobia. They stand by – or worse, participate – as rightwing blatherers spew an endless stream of hateful invective across the airwaves. They yearn for war, war and more war against an ill-defined enemy. They traffic in jingoistic soundbites and call it patriotism and stand in defense of a Constitution they haven’t bothered to read. And perhaps more destructively than anything else they say, do or deny, they willfully toy with our future by pretending that the wholesale ravaging of the environment has absolutely no effect.

Which brings me to today’s NYT report:

The Obama administration failed to act upon or fully inform the public of its own worst-case estimates of the amount of oil gushing from the blown-out BP well, slowing response efforts and keeping the American people in the dark for weeks about the size of the disaster, according to preliminary reports from the presidential commission investigating the accident. The government repeatedly underestimated how much oil was flowing into the Gulf of Mexico and how much was left after the well was capped in July, leading to a loss of faith in the government’s ability to handle the spill and a continuing breach between the federal authorities and state and local officials, the commission staff members found in a series of four reports issued Wednesday.

This confirms what many writers and activists suspected and warned about. The political ramifications are significant. If the GOP were not beholden to big oil or living in the stone age on environmentalism, they could ride this to a midterm landslide. That’s not to say that they won’t have a very successful election, even a historic one, but that this epic transgression by the White House could have inflicted near-fatal damage to Obama’s poll numbers and to Democrats’ standing and greatly enhanced Republican prospects.

After all, lying to the country about a matter that affects the fate of humanity, squandering a chance to revitalize the environmental movement and save countless lives, are monumental failings.

Fortunately for Obama and Democratic candidates, the right is hamstrung and simply can’t take political advantage.

Unfortunately for the planet, we’ve lost an unprecedented moment and are doomed to repeat the same mistakes. Next time, it may not be so easy to spike.