Worst Oil Spill Ever? Not Even Close...

No matter how often the Obama-ites pat themselves on the back for being smart enough to "never waste a crisis", it really was the newspapers that first came up with this theorem, of course. Make everything worse than it seems in order to scare the crap out of people and sell papers. Of course, all the media outlets do that now, and we as a people have become kind of immune to it.

But the BP/Gulf oil spill spinners use a less-used line of attack: An unfolding environmental disaster (unlike the just-around-the-corner-but-not-quite-here-yet "climate change"), possibly the worst ever, and now quantifiably worse than the Exxon Valdez incident (may its name be cursed for ever and ever):

From April 22, when the Deepwater Horizon drilling rig sank, through yesterday, and based on the midpoint of McNutt’s calculations, the well may have leaked about 527,000 barrels, more than double the Exxon Valdez’s 257,000-barrel spill....

Half a million barrels is a lot of oil. Thankfully, there's plenty more where that came from. But if you consider that total catastrophic, can you imagine the damage if, say sixteen times that amount was dumped into the drink?

8 millions barrels! Let's hang the bastard who engineered that!

Fortunately, we did:

As Iraqi troops retreated from Kuwait, they opened the valves of oil wells and pipelines, pouring up to 8 million barrels into the gulf...

Ah, that wacky Saddam Hussein. For this act of environmental terrorism of the highest order, one would have thought the Left would have cheered the Iraqi invasion of 2003....

But most importantly, what were the long-term ecological result of this massive oil spill? Can you say...nonexistent? If the New York Times can...

The vast amount of oil that Iraqi occupation forces in Kuwait dumped into the Persian Gulf during the 1991 war did little long-term damage, international researchers say.

"Given the phenomenal quantities of oil that were spilled into the Gulf, the results were rather cheering," Chidi Ibe, of the Intergovernmental Oceanographic Commission at Unesco, said in a statement today.

Coral reefs studied in early 1992 "appeared to be in good condition," while fisheries showed "few unequivocal oil pollution effects attributable solely to the 1991 oil spills," the study found.

The bottom line: Even if it takes another six weeks to fully plug the BP leak, we should expect nothing worse than a few sticky beaches, a couple of dirty birds, and minimal changes in the region's fisheries.

So maybe the media should calm down and offer some perspective, lest it have its energy rations cut under a cap & trade bill. And maybe President Obama ought to express concern without the hysteria or the histrionics so peculiar to a man who who was touted for his "superior temperament". And maybe the feds ought to back off of BP and Bobby Jindel, and let them figure how how to get the leak plugged as quickly as possible, without having to negotiate through encyclopedias of federal regulations and oversight.

And finally, let us all take a moment to thank George W. Bush, whose actions led to the capture and execution of the man who deliberately ordered what is, and likely always will be, truly the worst oil spill in human history...