Obama's Deepwater Response Another Disaster

The year and a half disaster known as the Obama administration has completely crystallized in their response, or should I say in the President's non-response, to the outrageous oil spill containment measures, and lack thereof, in the Gulf of Mexico.

On April 20th, an eon ago as far as appropriate disaster response by the government should be concerned, there was a fire and explosion on a British Petroleum (BP) licensed oil drilling rig known as the 'Deepwater Horizon' which was operating approximately 42 miles off the Louisiana coast at the time. Two days later the rig sank, and a 5-mile long oil slick became visible.

By April 25th, the US Coast Guard estimated that the rig was leaking approximately 1,000 barrels of crude oil per day into the waters of the Gulf. Within 3 more days that estimate had risen dramatically to 5,000 gallons per day. Still no effective response by President Obama or his administration. It would be another day, nearly a week after the initial incident, before he would announce "every single available resource" would help resolve the situation.

It would take until May 2nd before the President deemed the oil spill important enough to clear space from his busy schedule of private-industry takeovers, debt-and-tax raising program creation, and irresponsible financial entity bailouts to squeeze in a visit to the disaster area.

Over the next two weeks, the Obama administration would watch stoically and dispassionately as the oil spread towards Louisiana, reaching the Breton National Wildlife Refuge among other places. Despite leaving the incident in the hands of those who created it, Obama himself had the nerve to finally issue a statement on May 14th in which he chided the companies involved for creating a "ridiculous spectacle" of trading blame. Meanwhile, as Obama played Nero and fiddled, his Rome continued to burn as the oil slick continued to spread.

By May 19th the oil slick began to wash ashore at the Louisiana mainland and dangerously spread into heavy currents that could easily carry it on to Florida and beyond. Nine days after that, over a month after the initial incident, Obama finally made a 2nd visit to the area stating "I am the President, and the buck stops with me". But not apparently the oil slick, which continues on now with no end in sight as the month of May draws to a close. Some estimates are that at the current rates of oil spreading and poor effectiveness of response, it will not be contained until August.

During the administration of President George W. Bush, the liberal-controlled and Democratic Party-biased mainstream media and the Dems themselves all displayed self-righteous anger and indignation at the President and his team for what they deemed a particularly slow response in the exact same region of the country in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. Waiting for a similar reaction to Obama's non-action in the Gulf, one can hear the crickets chirping.

There will be the usual hand-wringing from the lib circles here. Calls to halt offshore oil drilling have already begun. The President himself had recently commented that the procedures and equipment in today's modern world were safe and secure. He was, in that instance, absolutely correct. Just because of one accident, no matter how large, we should absolutely not stop searching for American resources and doing what it takes to extract and utilize those resources. Just because one plane or bus crashes, people don't stop flying or riding the roads.

Former Alaska Governor Sarah Palin had it right when she led the call to "Drill baby, drill!" during her Veep run two summers ago. New geological surveys have revealed massive natural oil reserves are likely right here in the continental United States. Those are in addition to what we already know exists in her home state in the ANWAR reserves.

Despite her critics cat-calls, Palin loves here home state, and would never endanger it, and has led the fight to get those reserves opened and get the drilling going. She is absolutely correct, and needs to be supported publicly by all those who recognize the truth of energy resource management.

The United States needs to lessen our dependence on foreign sources of oil, be those sources from the Middle East or Russia, or from closer to home in Mexico or Canada. We have an abundance of those resources right here, and we need to go after them. Alternative energy needs to continue to be explored and developed, but those sources are not currently available or viable, and likely will not be for decades to come.

President Obama's excrutiatingly slow and ineffective response to this oil spill disaster is itself yet another disastrous example of the incompetence of his administration. We shouldn't extrapolate that by worsening our national economic situation.

Real American Hero: Brandon Darby

For the past couple of years I have written a semi-regular series of articles here titled "Real American Hero", all of the previous entries of which can be viewed by clicking on that 'label' at the bottom of this original post here at the http://www.mattveasey.com/ website.

Beginning with the very first article whose subject matter was Arizona Senator and former American POW John McCain, each of the entries has highlighted a hero from the American military. These were people who put their lives on the line, and in many instances laid down those lives, for their country. And except for McCain, every one of them was virtually anonymous outside of their own closest inner circle of family and friends.

But it is not just within the military that we can find individuals whose significant contributions have gone mostly unnoticed, and this article is going to begin the process of incorporating some of those civilian stories into the series as well. The story of Brandon Darby, a former radical leftist activist who openly called for the overthrow of the U.S. government turned Real American Hero, is a fitting one with which to begin.

Darby is a good ol' Texas boy who grew up to harbor and cultivate anti-government and anti-establishment feelings. He became an outspoken critic of fellow Texan George W. Bush during his presidency, in particular following Hurrican Katrina. It was in the relief response to the Katrina disaster in Louisiana that Darby began to come to some prominence.

As Matthew Vadum tells the story in Town Hall magazine, Darby used $50 of his own money to co-found the group 'Common Ground', a supposed relief agency that was in actuality a far-Left political activist organization that included a number of former Black Panther members. It was during and thanks to his experiences with this group that Darby's social and political viewpoint began to change and mature.

During the process of trying to restore some semblance of order and peace and rebuilding of lives in New Orleans, Darby met and began a relationship with an NOPD commander named Major John Bryson. At first completely distrustful of and at odds with one another, Darby and Bryson began to see as they worked both together and separately for the rebirth of the Crescent City that not only were each not the other's enemies, but they were indeed on the same side.

Then in 2006, Darby undertook a trip to Venezuela as part of a group seeking funding from the Marxist government of Hugo Chavez to keep Common Ground in operation. Chavez had been subverting American influence in the region by funneling discounted fuel oil through Congressman Joseph Kennedy of Massachuessettes, whose TV commercials painted Chavez as a friend to America's poor while portraying President Bush as disinterested at best.

When Darby arrived and began to meet with the Venezuelans it became obvious that helping New Orleans and Americans was the last thing on their minds. What they really wanted was to set up a terrorist network of guerrillas that would operate out of the swamps of Louisiana and begin work towards undermining the American government further.

As Vadum also reports, Darby was further alienated from his original Leftist beliefs when a long time friend from Texas, Riad Hamad, tried to hijack a new relief group that Darby was trying to start called 'Critical Response', which would have sent medics into Middle East and African war zones to help civilians who were caught there in cross-fire exchanges.

When Hamad began to suggest that the medics could be sent to Israel and put on motorcycles or in ambulances that could be fitted with bombs to kill Jews, Darby decided that law enforcement needed to be informed and approached the FBI's Joint Terrorism Task Force. This was a radical departure for the Lefty radical who previous to his relationship with Major Bryson in New Orleans would never have trusted law enforcement.

Darby was having the epiphany that many intelligent former Leftist and liberals have when they begin to wake up and realize that the world is not some utopian social experiment, but a real place where real people have to live out real lives, and where the worst power ever wielded has come from Marxist, Socialist and Communist governments. Darby began coming to an appreciation for the brilliance of the American system.

Without letting on to any of his many friends among the Leftist community, Darby began to work with the FBI as an informant in matters relating to these threats from Radical Islam and other segments of the violent underground community. It was here that Darby took the actions that completed his transformation from radical to right, from revolutionary to American hero.

At the request of the FBI, Darby infiltrated the Austin (Texas) Affinity Group, which had become allied with other radical organizations to form what had become known as the "RNC Welcoming Committee", a group that planned not to welcome but to completely disrput the Republican National Convention in Minnesota in 2008.

During his infiltration of the group, Darby met with and eventually informed on two individuals, David McKay and Bradley Crowder. These two had manufactured homemade riot shields for use in St. Paul to help radicals block the streets and keep GOP delegates from attending the convention. Their group also gathered gas masks, slingshots, helmets, knee pads, and even manufactured Molotov cocktails. Thanks to the cooperation of Darby, their plots to injure and possibly kill people at the convention were thwarted.

Darby could have continued to follow his original far-left impulses. He could have taken the Chavez regime money and fully funded his own organization and went along with plans to undermine America. He could have fully established his medic network in the Middle East and aided plans for attacks on Israel. He could have justified in his own head that somehow he was using the terrorist and Marxist groups himself to help needy people. Instead, Darby saw what was right. He saw that violence and power and hatred were what these organizations were truly about, not any kind of change in order to help real people. And as he truly compared these foreign groups and governments to his home, he awoke to the beauty of America.

Brandon Darby woke up in time to help save American lives and help keep the American system of peaceful political selection moving forward. As he said to Vadum: "I started to realize how brilliant and miraculous the American system of checks and balances was...that has been working since this nation was founded. I realized just how hard a task that is." He went on to state: "I'm proud of helping people, but I'm ashamed of what I used to believe. Thankfully, I had the honor of serving my country by working undercover with the FBI and participating in efforts to protect the safety and civil rights of others."

Clearly, Brandon Darby now gets it, finally. Having travelled the road of anti-establisment liberal to right-thinking American traditionalist myself, I can fully appreciate much of the journey that Darby has taken. You could have never told me that I would grow to become an American law enforcement officer, just as I'm sure you could not have told Darby that he would ever become an FBI informant. But in his willingness to do the right thing, and in his awakening to a full appreciation of the greatness of his nation, Brandon Darby certainly qualifies as a civilian Real American Hero.

It's A Hard Rain's Gonna Fall

For the 2nd time in three years, the City of New Orleans prepares this morning to be blasted by a powerful hurricane. The devastation wrought back in 2005 by Hurricane Katrina is now legendary, but a great deal of that horror was not a creation of God, or Mother Nature, or any kind of natural or supernatural being or event. The devastation was brought on man by man. For at least decades, the governments, both local and regional, and the people of the Gulf region were warned that this was going to happen, it was just a matter of time. It is not the responsibility of the federal government to build giant walls and roofs so that men can be protected from every possible disaster. Men need at some point to take responsibility for their own actions and lives. When you purposefully and intentionally make the decision that you and your family are going to live in an area that is historically prone to certain natural events, then you have chosen to take on certain risks and have the responsibility to ensure that you and yours can survive and recover when those events occur. And the key word in that entire statement is 'when', because this is not an 'if' scenario. Hurricanes barrel through the Atlantic Ocean and the Gulf of Mexico every single year, they have done so for all of recorded history, and they will continue to do so into the future. In the U.S., this means that coastal states such as Florida, Georgia, Alabama, Louisiana, Mississippi, Texas and the Carolinas are always going to be vulnerable to these types of events. Anyone who moves into or remains living in those states near the coastlines makes the choice that the beauty of everyday life there is worth the trade-off in having to evacuate or baton down when these strong storms hit. When they do hit, those who have made those decisions, along with their local and state governments, should be responsible for any recovery and rebuilding. It is not as if these events are a surprise, a sudden calamity that could not have been forecast. While any particular storm cannot be foreseen, the fact that there will be storms year after year, and that some of these will be of the devastating variety, means that people who live in these areas are rolling the dice. When we gamble and win, it is considered being 'lucky', it is not usually considered smart. When you gamble and lose, it should not be my responsibility to bail you out and put you back on your feet. Do people need help out of the goodness of others hearts? Sure, that is the point of charity and volunteerism. But for the federal government to continue to take hundreds of millions of dollars in hits because of the continued and repetitive gambling of some of our citizens is ridiculous. Every time that a natural disaster hits, the first question is "What is the federal government going to do about this?" The fact is that members of local governments have made the choice to be citizens of those communities, and they need to be responsible. They need to educate their fellow community members, prepare for responding to these incidents, and prepare for recovery from these incidents. The local governments and businesses and citizens of New Orleans and the surrounding parishes were told that a Katrina-like event was going to happen, and they chose to make other decisions over the years and decades in their spending that did not address the issues of basic protections against such a storm. Instead, the federal government was expected to protect them from their choice to live in that area, and bail them out in recovery when the event actually happened. And this is not the only example of this type of thinking and lack of preparation. For decades, the people in the San Francisco and Oakland areas, and many other communities in southern California, have been warned that a major earthquake of a devastating magnitude is going to strike at some point. Not some point hundreds of years in the future, but likely at some point in the next few years or decades. It is going to happen: buildings, bridges, roads, homes will topple and hundreds if not thousands or more of people are going to die. It is a fact of the future that every one of those people has been warned about. But they have chosen to live in those areas anyway because there are many benefits on a day-to-day basis. I respect and acknowledge the right of those folks to live in those areas. But they have chosen to live there in a known disaster-waiting-to-happen neighborhood, and when it happens, likely in my lifetime, it should not be my responsibility to bail them out and help them rebuild right there so that it can all happen again someday. Sudden, unexpected events are one thing. Predicted and expected events are another. One results in a tragedy, the other results in a bad choice coming home to roost. It appears that Hurricane Gustav, which will slam into Louisiana today, will not be nearly as bad as Katrina was, but it will be a strong storm that will beat down an area already beaten badly. The fact is that a hard rain is going to fall, and the further fact is that it won't be the last time.