Right on, Bob Herbert

Bob is my new favorite person at the New York Times. He seems way more "left" than the most of the rest of their people, and is very frank. All of which means he is a real, thinking person who says what he means and what he believes. He doesn't seem like a bullshitter.

He wrote this mostly great op-ed piece on Memorial Day:

If a bank is too big to fail, it’s way too big to exist. If an oil well is too far beneath the sea to be plugged when something goes wrong, it’s too deep to be drilled in the first place.

YES, fucking YES. Why can't people get that? What the hell business do you have drilling a mile under the sea (assuming that people have a "right" to extract petroleum in the first place, which they don't) when you have absolutely no plan in place in the event of a ruptured pipe, aside from drilling a new well? So many people buy into that industry/business/capital worshipping bullshit where people can do whatever they want in the interest of "progress" and profit.

Some of the rest of it is straight-up liberal and oddly patriotic, but I guess you have to do that shit to get a job there and keep it. They aren't going to publish things that I typically write here, for sure. They've got an agenda, and it is not the same as mine. But the editorial board does seem to allow people to deviate from it, to an extent.

Read on:

When are we going to stop behaving so stupidly? We nearly wrecked the economy and we’re all but buried in debt. But we can’t break up the biggest banks, and we can’t raise taxes. Now we’re fouling the magnificent Gulf of Mexico and ruining entire communities along the southern Louisiana Coast.

And, by the way, we’re still fighting a futile war in Afghanistan that we’ve been fighting with nonstop futility for nearly a decade. (I’m sure the troops saddled with this thankless task were thrilled to see fans and teams demonstrating their undying support for their efforts by wearing fancy baseball caps on Memorial Day.)

For a nation that can’t stop bragging about how great and powerful it is, we’ve become shockingly helpless in the face of the many challenges confronting us. Our can-do spirit was put on hold many moons ago, and here we are now unable to defeat the Taliban, or rein in the likes of BP and the biggest banks, or stop the oil gushing furiously from the bowels of earth like a warning from Hades about the hubris and ignorance that is threatening to destroy us.

BP and the Obama administration have been equally clueless about halting the millions of gallons of oil that have flowed into the gulf since the Deepwater Horizon explosion more than a month ago.

It's nice to see someone hitting at Obama who isn't some conservative piece of shit who will take any chance they can get to take a dump on him, just because he's not conservative, and is black.

Bob Herbert, I will be on a team with him any day. Hell yes, Bob.