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Deepwater drilling moratorium is embraced by anyone concerned about the environment and future generations

Circulating on the bumpers of automobiles and the backs of laptop computers across America is a sticker that says the following:

Drill Here
Drill Now
Pay Less

After I read a recent Sunday editorial in the city’s daily coming down hard on the Obama administration’s proposed sixth-month moratorium on deepwater oil drilling, I felt the widely circulated bumper sticker needs to be altered to read as follows:

Drill Here
Drill Now
Make A Mess.

Of course, reading the first set of words - "Drill Here, Drill Now, Pay Less" - requires one to consider the source. AmericanSolutions.com promotes itself as an all-encompassing collection of Republicans, Democrats and Independents seeking to find solutions to the nation’s problems. But its founder is Newt Gingrich, the former Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives, graduate of Tulane University and an early and verifiable hater of President Barack Obama.

Newt Gingrich and American Solutions make Sarah Palin look like Olive Oil. To be sure, ever since he was former President Bill Clinton’s most vigilant and visceral attacker (ultimately replaced by Tom “The Hammer” Delay), Gingrich has perfected the art of the agitator’s sound bite, never allowing a Democratic–and democratically elected–president the chance to push his policies without forging an opposition based on either personality or race.

The bumper sticker and its message is a play on words but it’s also an obvious truth. The sentiment is certainly there, especially among those who consider themselves stewards of a clean environment, individuals and groups who are not beholden to the warped and wicked philosophy that believes jobs and political expediency outweigh the need to make sure that offshore oil drilling never again compromises every American’s right to a clean and healthy environment.

After three decades in the newspaper business - a third of them in editorial writing and commentary - I’ve come to expect a certain degree of sanctimony when it comes to editorialists whose livelihoods depend on, I was once told, the ability to be able to ride down the hill on a white horse, sword in hand, arms stretched out and to find comfort in ramming the weapon into the chests of the mortally wounded.

Editorialists seldom criticize editorialists, and journalists rarely criticize journalists, at least not in mainstream journalism. (I don’t consider the hate radio of Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck and at least one non-black radio station in New Orleans that carries the standard bearer of hate’s name real journalism.) Journalists almost never do it in a public forum. Not this time. This is an exception. Truth must speak to power on this one.

The lengthy editorial, referred to here, accomplished little new in what has been the newspaper’s onslaught of hammering the Obama Administration’s six-month moratorium on deep-water oil drilling.

They have, by all accounts, given the oil industry and its dignitaries of dispersement unmitigated passes in accountability for the nation’s worst oil spill, even topping the infamous Exxon Valdez oil spill in Alaska’s Prince William Sound

By calling for the lifting of the moratorium, they are, in essence, calling for a resumption of the reckless and money-driven attitudes that caused the disaster, safeguards and precautions be dammed.

Hard to explain

Ordinarily, I would commend any media entity that demonstrated its fierce independence by so brazenly disagreeing with an administration that only two years earlier it sang the praises of, the same person they are now attacking. It would seem to be the right thing to do, taking the moral high ground on an issue that ultimately serves the public’s best interest.

The only problems is they are not doing it out of any particular moral compass or out of any bold stroke of journalistic intrepidity or because it is right. And their well rehearsed repetition call for the resumption of deepwater drilling endangers everyone, including workers, citizens, brown pelicans, herons, egrets, shrimp, oysters and the turtles... and future generations.

Maybe we should ask them their opinions on the matter.

The editorial board is doing it for various reasons, no doubt.

As for the editorialists, they are doing it because it plays to the sounds of selfish behavior, myopic thinking and outright greed of a Louisiana cultural constituency that has become addicted to Big Oil, its jobs, its royalties, its production and its funding of the bulk of an entire state’s political apparatus.

The same editorial board that endorsed Barack Obama for president and Mitch Landrieu for mayor is the same editorial board that endorsed Bobby Jindal, David Vitter, Steve Scalise, and Joseph Cao for political office. For all the assertions that the media are a bunch of far-left leaning liberals, this is an editorial board that is showing its true and harsh conservative leanings at the expense of fair journalism and, to borrow a phrase from its own deep-seated roots in New Orleans aristocracy, Pro Bono Publico, For The Public Good.

Nevertheless, the general tenor of the endorsements and reasons for resuming deepwater oil drilling have all been the same. We’ll scratch your back if you scratch ours. Oh, it helps if you’re a Republican extremist.