Quite frankly I don’t know what to say about this. Watching an oil spill whose size makes the Exxon Valdez accident look like somebody dropped a stick of butter as it gets closer and closer to the shores that still haven’t recovered from the devastation of Katrina is a little like watching a train wreck. A train needs a certain amount of time to brake to a stop–and that means several miles in the case of a heavy freight train or a fast passenger train. Any attempt to stop quicker is just simply not going to work because it’s against the laws of physics. So you step on the brake in the hope of minimizing the damage and wait for the inevitable crash, watching in horrified fascination as the train gets closer and closer.

In the meantime, the blame game has started. The Obama administration has blamed it on BP. BP has blamed it on the contractors in charge of the drilling and on faulty equipment. Blame the tools! The media and the right wing have begun blaming Obama for not doing enough to stop the crisis, despite the fact that the federal government had offered help, been turned down and told that the situation was being managed. They should have stepped right in and taken over, say the people who normally howl over any sort of government interference. And Sarah Palin has spun on the proverbial dime and has become sooooooo concerned about the environmental issues that you’d think she’d never even heard the phrase, “Drill, Baby, Drill,” that she led her supporters in chanting throughout the 2008 presidential campaign.

Clearly there is more than enough blame to go around, and I’ll not exempt the Obama administration for not acting quickly enough. Sometimes, you need to step up to the plate. Sometimes, acting quickly is more important than making sure all the p’s are p’s and q’s are q’s. But even if it HAD acted faster–is there anything that really could have been done? Or was this truly like the train wreck that no matter what you do, no matter how hard you try, no matter how fast you act, that collision is just going to occur and there ain’t nothing you can do about it.

Obama says that BP is going to pay for it. No. The one certain thing in every disaster that has occurred as long as I can remember is that BP will wriggle out of it and pay off at best a token amount that seems big only if you do not take into account the amount of damage this accident will cause. But it will be paid for… and the people who will pay for it will be? US.

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