The wonderful thing about Louisiana is the commitment to living life to the fullest. The devastation and embarrassment of Hurricane Katrina could have buried the state in self-pity for a long time, but sure enough they rolled up their sleeves and worked to rebuild. When the BP oil spill happened, it looked like yet another setback, but I’ll be damned if they’re going to let something like a cleanup effort hurt their good time.

Why not just allocate money meant to clean up the BP Oil Spill toward their bicentennial celebration?

The state’s turning 200 years old and Governor Bobby Jindal is looking to blow Mardi Gras, the Saints Super Bowl victory parade, and New Years clear out of the water. The fact that that water is still filled with compressed sludge composed of dinosaurs, poisoning an unknown amount of sea creatures and wrecking the Gulf Coast’s fishing industry, is not about to put a damper on that party.

This incredibly wise spending of the oil spill cleanup money is nothing new. After all, cleaning up the crude is a whole lot of work and it’s so far out in the water that nobody is ever going to notice. Why not spend that money making sure everybody knows how bad the spill that you’re not cleaning up actually is?

The state Department of Culture, Recreation and Tourism, which Dardenne oversees, got $6.5 million from BP, with $5 million of that being used for marketing and advertising related to the spill.

There ya go! Great job, Bobby.
My hat’s off to the Jindal Administration. First off, it’s not like anybody can see the oil anymore (well, except fish, but they don’t vote). Second, everybody knows that if you’ve got money that needs to be spent, and you can’t see a problem to fix, you get good and sloshed. It’s just the New American way. The bad news with this mindset is that the oil doesn’t actually get cleaned up, the fish die en masse, and the fishermen all go broke in an economy where there isn’t a whole lot of lateral movement for them. The good news? We can take solace in the fact that Nero held to New American ideals.

Besides, this party’s supposed to last from September 2012 through December 2012. By the time the voters in Louisiana are sober, Governor Bobby will have time to slap together some PR to weasel into another term. Ba-zing.

I’d like to think Gub Bob (my little nickname for him) is trying to solve our energy crisis. By wasting away as much money as possible, he’s making the generations that worked hard to build this country spin round and round in their graves. Hook up a couple of turbines and we won’t need oil or nuclear plants in the great state of Louisiana.

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Tags: diatribes, politics & government // 3 Comments »