Get Ready for a New Cable Channel

Get ready America.  You are about to learn a whole lot more about wildlife in the Gulf of Mexico than you ever wanted to know.  The recent oil spill in the Gulf has provided the liberal mainstream press with its latest mission in life.  A blitzkrieg of anti-drilling propaganda is about to be unleashed on an unsuspecting public.    Now I don't mean to belittle the importance of the ecological disaster that may be evolving in the Gulf of Mexico.  I am a believer in offshore drilling, but even a proponent like me has to pause and ask the question, "Is it safe?"  You don't need to be an Environmentalist (capital E) to value the environment. 

Sensible people will want to find out what happened, how bad it will it get, what are the chances of it happening again, and can we learn from this accident to prevent the next one.  The Green movement in this country won't let on if they're smart, but I'll bet they're jumping for joy at the news.  I'll bet they are gearing up to demagogue this thing to death.  The eco-missionary evangelists will want no part of a sensible discussion.  This will become a mother lode of anti-drilling news "content" and sensationalism.  It will be the Chernobyl and the Three Mile Island for the Offshore Oil Industry. 

So get ready for the deluge.  You won't be able to turn on your TV or open a web page on your favorite news source without being bombarded with images of oil soaked birds.  Poor, helpless, innocent, dying oil soaked birds.  Oil soaked birds for breakfast, oil soaked birds for lunch, and oil soaked birds for dinner.  24/7 oil soaked birds.  The mainstream media are going to eat this stuff up.  "Who's gonna waste time on rational debate, when we've got visuals like these?" the news producers and the editors will say. 

We will not see the end of this story for a long time to come.  Your local cable provider has got to be cutting the deals and figuring out how to rearrange the channel line-up even as I write this.  Let's see.  We've got the Golf Channel.  Nothing but golf.  We've got The Weather Channel.  How interesting can you make the weather 24 hours a day?  We've got a couple of shopping channels.  Shop until the remote is too hot to handle.  We've got a bunch of food channels, and God knows we've got a whole slew of channels devoted to nothing but sports.  But get ready for the mother of all one dimensional programming alternatives.  They'll call it The Oil Soaked Wildlife Channel.  All oil soaked birds, all the time. Get out the manual for your TV.  You're going to have to learn how that V-Chip thingy works.  You're going to have to block this channel from your young impressionable kids lest they wind up with nightmares of slick stained seagulls and petroleum permeated pelicans.   And who wants to face the perpetually crying four year old begging for you to reassure him that Big Bird was not a victim of mayhem at the hands of the evil oil companies. 

Yes, it will get ugly America.  Ugly in a way that only the left can do ugly.  It's as if heaven has bestowed a gift on the Obama administration.  One more industry to demonize and subjugate to the will of the big government agenda.  Don't shed too many tears for the poor birds.  Save some for  American industry, capitalism and the free market system.  They're likely to be the real losers when this is over.

Jess