The Barbour-Steele-Palin-Paul Circus

One might think that the worst imaginable "impact" along Mississippi's coastline would be gazillions of gallons of British Petroleum's finest washing and globbing up on its sandy white beaches. But Mississippi Gov. Haley Barbour is a man of reformulating vision:

"The biggest negative impact for us has been the news coverage," he said yesterday on "Fox News Sunday."

In a way, of course, Haley was correct. If it weren't for the doubleplusungood media, the proles would be booking the Magnolia State's summer vacation huts with unknowing abandon, left only to suffer the minor inconvenience of building tarball- rather than sand-castles. Well, perhaps they'll now book a Turkish flotilla instead.

Even more problematic than the governor's economic bind, however, is his political one, reflected in this solecism about President Obama's offshore-drilling moratorium: "If you shut this down, you’re not shutting this down for six months." Translation: multinational oil companies will take their faulty blowout preventers and drill elsewhere.

Now that too may sound doubleplusungood to Mississippi's offshore-oil workers, who vote, but increasingly it sounds pretty darn good to the American electorate at large.

In the latest CBS News poll, a slight but almost certainly amplifying majority -- 51 percent -- "say the costs and risks of increased offshore drilling are too great." Just a month ago the disapproving percentage was 41. Only 40 percent now say "they favor increased offshore drilling," which, as CBS News also pointed out, is a whopping 22-percentage -point plunge from August 2008, when Keith Olbermann's favorite "Idiot" was revving up the GOP's nose-boned natives to chant "Drill, baby, drill."

All of whom, no doubt, will buy into Ms. Palin's additional fantasies about the Democratic Party being especially beholden to Big Oil, even though the GOP rakes in three times the bribery, as well as her latest mindbender: If only those puritanical environmentalists had permitted oil companies to rape Alaska's virgin soil, the latter would not have gone to sea for satisfaction.

At the risk of fomenting further polarization or even incurring the swooning wrath of David Broder, one must in that famously final analysis concur with the rather blunt Mr. Olbermann: That woman is an idiot.

Lest anyone think that such harshness stems from misogynistic roots, we should keep in mind the GOP's manly Rand Paul, who instantly became an even bigger laughingstock when he derided the White House for being "really un-American" in its "criticism of business." The oil business, that is.

Hey, said Rand, "accidents happen." To which one can only say: That man is an idiot.

But back to the other politics of this "accident," which President Obama, in his Saturday radio address, dubbed not merely "brutally unfair" -- which accidents are -- but "wrong" -- a value judgment which valid accidents tend to skirt. And just what did the RNC's Michael Steele, in the GOP's response, have to say about that?

Well, he said "enough is enough"; that the White House should fess up about its scandalous attempts to keep Joe Sestak and Andrew Romanoff out of Senate races; that its denials of wrongdoing fail to "pass the laugh test"; and that the whole wicked shebang once again points to a "a larger pattern of backroom, Chicago-style politics."

Say what?

Ah, but remember the GOP's three-to-one advantage in oil money. Remember its untouchable "Paradiso" of corporate virtue versus the "Inferno" of government intervention and regulation. Remember, which it hopes you don't, that good policy can involve short-term economic pain -- and finally remember that 51 percent of Americans now agree.

For the GOP, those are problems. Big ones. So better to blather about "Chicago-style politics" (by the way, what other style would a politician from Chicago practice?) or the very ungood news coverage of a doubleplusungood environmental catastrophe.

These people are idiots.