John McCain Lied About Oil Not Being Spilled After Katrina and Rita and Conservative Pundits Have Been Making the Lie Bigger

Well, you can believe that John McCain didn't lie when he said as reported by Think Progress in  "Conservatives Echo McCain’s False Claim That Katrina Caused No Oil Spill Damage":

 In a Tuesday speech delivered before an audience of oil executives, Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) pushed to overturn the federal ban on offshore oil drilling. McCain claimed drilling is so “safe” that “not even Hurricane Katrina and Rita could cause significant spillage from battered rigs off the coasts of New Orleans and Houston.”

And the fine people at TP have quotes from other conservatives that don't even hedge their words like McCain does, though Interior Sect. Kempthorne did manage to get that "significant spillage" description into his words on the subject.  Must have gotten the same memo from oil company lobbyists as McCain's camp did.  Suddenly there was no oil spilled anywhere in the Gulf according to McCain parrots, who didn't check out the facts.  These aren't people raving on the street corners and harassing people at the mall because they have the wrong bumper sticker, but important pundits that conservatives that other Americans figure will bother to check whether their facts are straight.  Well, don't bother next time folks.  The right wing commentators are checking out whether their in line for more quarter million prizes from conservatives think tanks for saying the right things to promote Republican candidates.  They don't have time to check out facts.  You should check out the list of names on TP's list though to learn which columnists and other right wing sources of information you can't trust in the future. 

But it might be that the Lazy McCain campaign -- do they have a brand for that?-- just didn't bother to check out the facts for themselves..

TQ also has links to pictures from space showing oil slicks in the gulf on September 2, 2005. 

I just wanted to excerpt a part from one of their linked reports just in case you might miss it.

From Houston Chronicle November 13, 2005 "Industry says there was no way to prepare for spills ", long before anyone knew that John McCain was going to declare that there'd been "no significant spillage" from offshore drilling during and after Katrina and Rita.

In the week after Katrina and Rita, 114 unknown sheens — rainbow, silver and dark-brown slicks with no clear origin — were reported, the records show.

and the total "insignificant" spillage (land and sea) was 9 million gallons:

Some have even compared the total amount of oil released — estimated at 9 million gallons — to the tragedy of Exxon Valdez.

So I guess John McCain and Big Oil don't considered spills 'significant' unless they cost Big Oil Big Money.

But truly amazing are those right wingers that have decided that there was no spillage.  Now America knows which right wing pundits just take the half baked talking points that appear in their email and barely rewrite them to make thousands cranking out columns. 

tags: john mccain  offshore oil drilling  katrina rita oil spillage  

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