Comrade Obama Attacks Constitution

Good old Joe -- always looking out for the big people. It's a tough job, but someone has to do it.

Meanwhile, the ever-reliable Michele Bachman warned that the escrow account is a "redistribution-of-wealth fund" that could encourage "perpetual unemployment" among all those lazy Cajuns who presumably don't have the same work ethic as laconic and diligent Minnesotans. After warning of $9-a-gallon gas, she belched forth this wonderfully paranoid non sequitur:

If there is a disaster, why is it that government is the one who always seems to benefit after a disaster, and that’s of course what cap-and-trade would be.

Teabagger leader and former Texas congressman Little Dick Armey -- well remembered for his relentless and courageous attacks on the Bush Administration's daily trashing of the Constitution -- accused President Obama of illegally usurping authority and suggested that the whole matter would be better handled by tying up the court system for years. As an example, he cited approvingly something that can only come under the heading of Frivolous Law Suit.

While the Republican Study Committee called the escrow account a "Chicago-style shakedown," Mississippi governor Haley "Cunnel" Barbour wondered plaintively, ""If they take a huge amount of money and put it in an escrow account so they can't use it to drill oil wells and produce revenue, are they going to be able to pay me us?" And, the usual gang of idiots decided that the escrow account is nothing but a slush fund.

American voters might ask themselves a couple of questions:

1. Do they really want politicians who think that the ultimate test of the American Way means forcing individuals harmed through no fault of their own to fight years-long court battles against a $300 billion transglobal corporation with endless resources?
2. Do they really want to vote for people stupid enough to say this stuff?

The foolishness is everywhere, though. Apologies for not having the link to the Firedog Lake blogger who complained bitterly that President Obama had negotiated the escrow account (and, presumably, the $500 million fund for illnesses caused by the spill, the $100 million dollar fund to compensate rig workers laid off by the moratorium, and the delay in dividend payouts) instead of just seizing the money, never mind that this couldn't get past a federal court in Vermont. Nope, it all proves that Obama is a tool of Big Oil.

One lawyer doesn't think so:

The 20 billion fund should be viewed as a huge accomplishment for Obama. He had no actual power to compel that aside from moral suasion and the threat of having an unhappy president. Legally, BP could have just waited for the lawsuits and drawn the whole thing out for years. As a lawyer, I find it a unique and mind-boggling accomplishment...

Tony Hayward takes the Fifth (or whatever it is in Britain)...

Early summertime from the parking garage roof, bank building on Prytania...

Republicans along with DINO Ben Nelson and that malignant Connecticut toad Joe Lieberman spill boiling oil on the jobless victims of Bushonomics...

The great E. J. Dionne says "Democrats: You're kicking butt. Why the long faces?" The culture of complaint that infects so much of progressivism is one reason...