Dan Calabrese: Sarah Palin's courageous leadership on domestic drilling (Updated)

*
Dan Calabrese, writing in The North Star National, sees the Deepwater Horizon rig explosion and the resulting oil spill as a good test of spine stiffness for the GOP. One Republican, he says, has passed the test, and it’s Sarah Palin, as usual, but Calabrese is not encouraged by the signs he's seeing from others in the Shy Elephant Party:

A day after pundit Charles Krauthammer declared “drill, baby, drill” to be history in light of the spill, and two days after the Obama Administration halted all domestic drilling (gee, what a surprise), Palin came out and invoked her moral authority as an Alaskan who lived through the Exxon Valdez spill.

Yes, Palin says, the spill is horrible, as was the Exxon Valdez, which was why she took steps as a regulator in Alaska to put tighter controls on the oil companies. But she still comes to the same conclusion she’s touted before: We need domestic drilling.

No matter how horrible the British Petroleum spill proves to be, it won’t change the economic reality. We are putting our economy and our national security at risk when we rely on the likes of Venezuela and Saudi Arabia to get the oil we need. And it is insane to do this when we can and should drill for oil on our own lands and in waters we control.

This drilling can be done safely and cleanly. It obviously wasn’t in the case of the BP explosion, but it can and it should.

[...]

We need more domestic drilling, including off-shore, but when the GOP was in charge, they didn’t make it happen. We needed market-oriented health care reform, but it was easier for the GOP to do little or nothing on the issue, so they left the door open for Democrats to create a socialist behemoth the first chance they got. We need to get federal spending and entitlements under control, but that’s too hard because the media and the Democrats will say you hate Grandma. So the GOP did nothing.

Real leadership is what you do when it’s right but it’s also hard. McConnell, Boehner and company have never been known for this, and now we have the latest example as to why.

Many Americans get that we need to drill domestically but in the midst of the current hysteria over the spreading oil slick, Calabrese says it takes courage to say so. While most Republicans run and hide, Gov. Palin stands her ground and speaks truth to hysteria. This, he concludes, is another reason why Sarah Palin is so admired by so many.

The left has already started trying to pin the whole Deepwater Horizon blowup on Sarah Palin, but as we noted late last night, and Dan Riehl was one of the first to point out, the drilling plan was submitted to and approved by Minerals Management Services (MMS) on Obama's watch.

But though MMS signed off on the project, it never had a plan to answer the question, What could possibly go wrong? The Portland Press Herald reported:

Hammond Eve, who did environmental impact studies of offshore drilling for the Interior Department's Minerals Management Service (MMS), said the federal agency never planned for response to an oil spill of this size. "We never imagined that it would happen because the safety measures were supposed to work and prevent it from happening," he said.

Perhaps that will serve to explain why the Obama administration dithered for eight days following the offshore explosion. To try to divert attention away from such facts about the unfolding tragedy on and off the coast of Louisiana , the left is trying to characterize the oil-contaminated area as "Lake Palin." That flies in the face of the facts. If anything, it should be called The Gulf of Obama. Legal eagle blogger John Hinderaker:

It appears clear from this record that the Obama administration 1) underestimated what was obviously a major incident with potential for environmental catastrophe, and assumed a best-case scenario--the opposite of what Ken Salazar now claims; 2) relied for too long on British Petroleum to contain the spill, without taking decisive action to protect American interests in the Gulf Coast; 3) had no real plan in place for how a major spill in the Gulf could be contained; and 4) to this day, remains obsessed with asserting that financial responsibility lies with BP, without any apparent understanding of how inadequate such liability will prove to those whose livelihoods have been devastated.

This is Obama's Katrina, and it's not Bush's fault or Sarah Palin's. BP deserves its share of the blame, but there comes a point in time when the Obama administration will have to take responsibility for its decisions and actions or lack of same. But don't bet on it doing so. With the Obamunists, it's always someone else that is to blame.

Update: Wonder of wonders, WaPo PostPartisan columnist Jonathan Capehart, a frequent Palin critic, agrees with the governor on this one:

"...on the issue of offshore drilling, Palin's Friday missive makes sense. There, I said it."

[...]

"I won't join the chorus demanding that off-shore drilling be stopped forever in the U.S. for one simple reason: Until renewable energy sources are more widely available we have no choice. We need the fuel."

Another rare display of intellectual honesty from the left. Kudos to Capehart for admitting that Sarah Palin is right

- JP