Chris Matthews is an idiot

Posted by AzBlueMeanie:

OK, I have had enough of the hyperventilating nonsense emanating from Chris "Tweety" Matthews this week over the Deepwater Horizon oil spill.

To paraphrase Tweety, he wants the president to "nationalize" or to order ("dragoon them into service") oil supertankers and have them encircle the spill in the Gulf of Mexico and begin sucking up the oil for reprocessing. Apparently he read about this technique being used in the Arabian Sea several years ago after an oil supertanker ran aground and leaked oil.

Tweety cites Harry Truman as his role model. In 1946, Truman ended a national railway strike by seizing control of the railways and threatening to draft striking workers into the armed forces or to use the Army to replace the striking workers. The strikers settled. In 1952, Truman seized the nation's steel mills during a steelworkers strike citing his authority as commander-in-chief (a precursor to Dick Cheney's "unitary executive" theory). The Supreme Court found Truman's actions unconstitutional, however, and reversed the order in a major separation-of-powers decision, Youngstown Sheet & Tube Co. v. Sawyer. It was one of the most notable defeats of Truman's presidency.

Apparently Tweety does not have a problem with presidents exercising extra-constitutional, almost dictatorial powers, that the U.S. Supreme Court has held is unconstitutional (a fact Tweety always ignores to mention).

But let's take a closer look at the "solution" with which Tweety is so enamored. He wants the president to "nationalize" or to order ("dragoon them into service") oil supertankers into the Gulf of Mexico. The world's fleet of oil supertankers sail under "flags of convenience" – they are not U.S. ships but under foreign registry. Oil tanker – Wikipedia.

As of 2007, Panama is the world's largest flag state for oil tankers with 528 vessels. Six other flag states have more than 200 registered oil tankers: Liberia (464), Singapore (355), China (252), Russia (250), the Marshall islands (234), and the Bahamas (209). By way of comparison, the United States has only 59.

The president has no constitutional or legal authority to seize the private property of a sovereign nation and to order its crew into the service of the United States. This constitutes piracy and also an act of war. Tweety can't be bothered with maritime law, the Law of the Sea Treaty, or conventions of war. These are inconvenient facts that get in the way of his demand for action.

The U.S. conceivably could contract with foreign companies and pay them for the service of their oil supertankers. Many of these supertankers are perpetually in service delivering the world markets their supply of oil. There are only so many oil supertankers available at any given moment.

The method with which Tweety is so enamored involved an oil supertanker that leaked oil onto the surface of the Arabian Sea. Skimming operations are somewhat effective with this type of spill. But the Deepwater Horizon is not a surface spill. It is a pressurized leak from almost a mile below the ocean surface. It has been reported that there are massive plumes of oil moving through the various temperate zones of the ocean and within the strong currents in the Gulf of Mexico well below the surface. New, giant sea oil plume seen in Gulf (Marine scientists have discovered a massive new plume of what they believe to be oil deep beneath the Gulf of Mexico, stretching 22 miles). What you see on the surface is quite literally the tip of the iceberg by analogy.

In other words, what Tweety Matthews is hyperventilating on and on about this week is unlawful, impractical and quite impossible. Chris Matthews is an idiot. He should shut the hell up and quit his demagoguery of this tragedy. This is not reporting nor good journalism — it is "infotainment" — way short of useful information and way too much useless entertainment.

I agree with the observation of Mark Sumner at Daily Kos Gulf gusher "top kIll" attempt:

One thing that might not be clear from watching the news: this isn't a matter of a dozen guys at BP and a PR team from the Obama administration. A "war room" full of industry experts from over 70 oil companies and drilling technology companies has been working on this problem night and day since the week of the explosion. If you count up the people from EPA, Army Corps of Engineers, and Coast Guard assigned to this issue, the federal government has over 20,000 people involved. The response to this issue has been massive.

BP has done it's best (by failing to share video and using dispersants) to mask the size of the disaster, but both industry and government have responded to the problem on a scale appropriate the to massiveness of the issue. If if doesn't look like there's anything going on, it's just further evidence of the US news industry's inability to cover anything that isn't cut, dried, and packaged according to a well known script.

That said, the size of government and industry response should in no way be comforting. Even with that level of attention, the gusher is in its 36th day and the effects of the oil — both financial and ecological — are only beginning to be felt. The fact that government and industry are responding massively shows only that this kind of deep water drilling is far more dangerous and difficult than the oil industry ever admitted. Maybe even more dangerous than they knew.

This isn't a failure of response. It's a failure of imagination and preparation in planning for what might happen long before the tragedy aboard Deepwater Horizon.

UPDATE: In this segment of Hardball, Admiral Thad Allen and Prof. Ed Overton, professor of Environmental Sciences at LSU, shoot down every one of Tweety's fantastical theories. Despite this, Tweety's "final word" at the end of this program was again him calling on the president "to dragoon them into service" in support of his plan. This demagoguery is unacceptable from the media.

This environmental catastrophe has exposed two problems. The first is a "know-it-all" media that presumes to tell the public what they would do in this situation. Their opinions are not informed by  science or engineering. Few reporters have any background in science or engineering. Nearly all of the blow-dried pretty boys and girls in the media today have never held a dirty job nor done an honest days work of hard labor in a dangerous profession like oil drilling. They know not of what they speak. Which brings us to the second problem exposed, a dangerous lack of science and engineering education and understanding in this country. There is an anti-intellectual rejection of science when Tweety disregards what Adm. Allen and Prof. Overton just explained to him to continue to push his "know-it-all" media solution that is nonsense.

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