I feel vindicated. Do you remember early on in this spill I was misquoted as saying, “Don’t do anything! It will clean itself up.”
I never said don’t do anything. It was me and Gene Taylor, the Democrat congressman from Mississippi who flew over and said, “The sea will take care of it. It’s gonna break up.”
And the powers that be and the leftists said, “Oh, this is horrible! These people don’t understand how bad this is! It’s going to destroy everything: Beaches, birds, dolphins, sharks, shrimp, whatever. It’s going to kill everything. It’s the worst disaster that we’ve ever had, even worse than Exxon Valdez,” blah, blah. Now, I was saying this amount of oil seeps into the Gulf every day. Not in one big concentrated dose like it’s doing here, but — and where does it go? The ocean eats it up. (…)
One of the biggest tools that our government and media uses to shape public opinion and to create an obedient populace is crisis. Any time there is a chance for crisis, they love it. They eat it up. They make it worse and they expand upon it even worse than it is.
That’s right: Armageddon didn’t happen. Instead of terrible harm to the biosphere, the Deepwater Horizon spill has caused only mild problems. In fact, because of the fishing bans imposed after the spill, there are more fish than ever. Shark and mackerel populations have exploded. “Red snapper are unbelievable right now,” one fisherman said. “You could put a rock on the end a string and they’d bite it.”
Not one story I read bothered to chronicle the Gulf’s astonishing recovery. The lone exception was a brave CBC reporter who dared to say that things were looking pretty good. A wire story in the Toronto Star was far more typical. “You can’t see or smell the oil, but scientists fear problems are hidden in marshes and the food web,” the headline said.
In fact, most scientists believe the Gulf is in surprisingly good shape…
