The Invisible Stain

Every drop of water on the planet will sooner or later circulate through the Gulf of Mexico. Ergo, the whole planet will bear the stain of this clusterfuck for a score of thousands of years. Via Digby (now on Facebook):

If You Can't See it, It Isn't Happening

by digby

I had been wondering about this. It's seemed as though the Gulf spill wasn't getting the kind of coverage it merits, but I didn't know if it was just me. Apparently not:


A few comments. The Exxon Valdez spill in 1989 obviously got an enormous amount of coverage, but it's striking that even incidents like the 1978 Amoco Cadiz accident off the coast of France got far more coverage than the current BP spill. (Brulle focused on nightly network coverage because, he points out, that's still the biggest driver of public opinion in the country—after all, only a very small subset of people read the Times.)

The reporter,Brad Plumer, notes that some of this is because the pictures aren't there -- not enough dead birds and fish to make people understand how huge this is. I'm sure that's part of it. And it isn't an accident.

Digby goes on to articluate how skillfully BP has disseminated their clouds of rhetorical dispersant in equal quantities with the toxic they have profligately spread on the troubled waters to avoid the appearance of the toxic shock that overtook folks in the wake of the Exxon Valdez.

Mission accomplished! They may not get it fixed, but you'll never know how bad it is.