Democrats: Remember how you cringed when Sarah Palin rallied her crowds into chanting “Drill, baby, drill!”, giving their full-throated support to offshore drilling around the United States, including the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge in Alaska? Do you also recall how much flak you gave the Bush administration for proposing the same? Your president has been busy in the kitchen lately putting out dish after dish of delicious reform, so you can be forgiven for not noticing he boiled crow, plated it, and now expects you to eat it.
The Obama administration is set to announce plans to allow offshore drilling for oil and natural gas through 2017.
Obama’s plans will include opening new areas of coastal Virginia and other parts of the mid-Atlantic region, Alaska and the eastern Gulf of Mexico for drilling. But officials say the president will block drilling in Alaska’s Bristol Bay, where the George W. Bush administration’s drilling plans in 2007 angered environmentalists.
So you see, Obama isn’t like Bush and Palin in this regard because of that one symbolic gesture. It’s the same way that Obama isn’t as secretive as Bush, except when he is, how he’s all about accountability, except when he isn’t, and how he’d never game his legal council to give answers he wants to hear, except that he has. Despite mischaracterizations to the contrary, Barack Obama is a center-left Democrat, and a politician. Even when politicians are good, they’re bad, if you get my meaning.
Bon Appétit!
