This video comes to us from The Heritage Foundation. Rory Cooper, director of strategic communications at the Heritage Foundation, just spent a week in the Gulf on what Heritage is calling a fact-finding mission. On Tuesday, he was interviewed by Kathryn Jean Lopez, editor of National Review Online, and discussed what he found.
Here's a clip:
LOPEZ: What is the federal government’s role today?
COOPER: The federal government needs to stop the leak, first and foremost. But its other #1 priority, side-by-side, is to clean the oil that has already spilled. While BP is paying for the effort, the government has the sole obligation to lead it. But in reality, the role they are playing is one of delays, bureaucracy and red tape. The federal effort so far is a catastrophic failure.
LOPEZ: Has it missed opportunities?
COOPER: Of course. The federal government let weeks and months slip by while ignoring international offers of assistance; they failed to deploy skimmers when necessary and are still not transparent about what skimming capabilities they have; their delays on permitting rock jetties and sand berms have hampered state and local efforts to protect the environment and surely caused irreversible damage to the Louisiana ecosystem.
H/T: bkmck
