Everything looks fine.

This photo was taken on 8 May, about two weeks after an oil company punched a hole in the floor of the Gulf of Mexico and unleashed a torrent of petroleum products and related poisonous nasties such as methane. Given the money-saving shortcuts taken by the offending companies and and the dereliction of duty on the part of government agencies charged with regulating relevant industries it is improper to refer to this disaster as an accident.

And whether or not to call this "oil spill" an "accident" is a critical question, not a mere academic argument. This is especially true for the Obama administration. They've got a tough political problem in handling this situation because a truthful account of the events leading up to (and following) the moment at which the Deepwater Horizon exploded would reveal that the federal government, under the leadership of both of the major political parties, had given up its role as watchdog of industry and become instead an enabler of businesses whose only obligation (so they believed) was the maximization of profit.

Starting way back in the late 60's, the laissez-faire "free-market" folks were joined by the social conservatives to form a numerically significant right-of-center coalition that managed to get millions of ordinary wage-slaves to voting against their own economic interests in return for support on all manner of social issues from abortion control to prayer in the schools. This is not an unnatural linkage in this country. There has long been a religious (specifically evangelical Christian) flavor to American capitalism. (Some companies make no bones about it, though there are laws that limit how freely a company may express such sentiments.) But even if a corporation is solidly secular in its outlook it surely isn't opposed to supporting a candidate who is willing to cooperate on important pieces of financial and regulatory legislation even if the candidate's social agenda lies to the right of Attila the Hun.

Today, any candidate for public office must pay attention to the Conservative coalition. Even if his own outlook is progressive, he is a lucky man or woman whose district is so homogeneously liberal that he can just "blow off" both big business and the "guns, guts, and God" portion of the electorate. It's the former who supplies the money now needed to finance the campaign of even the most minor electoral candidate and the latter who pull the levers that actually get people elected.

And so, if for over 40 years Conservative voters have at least gotten their side of the story well-represented they've also gotten a government that has much more quietly been stripped of its much-needed protective agencies, the people who see that the drugs your doctor prescribes don't poison you, that the meat you blithely wolf down isn't contaminated by the feces of cows and pigs who are too sick to be eaten by any sane person, that the air you breathe and the water you drink aren't polluted, and the oceans you fish and swim in aren't filled with oil from drilling projects that were conducted without proper oversight.

Over all these years, many many officials--of both parties, holding seats through both election and appointment--have participated in giving the biggest campaign contributors a government that is of-by-and-for those very businesses. And the public welfare be damned.

This disaster in the Gulf has the potential to reveal to the public what it has gotten and still is getting for its money. It might just be that people who are worried about flag-burning and fetuses will be more than a little angry when they learn that the price they've paid for the candidates they thought they wanted is a country that's run by a small number of very rich people who don't care what happens to the children and grandchildren of all those "little" people who buy oil and invest their "little" savings in banks.

Mr. Obama's best political strategy is to join with BP and Halliburton in saying that the "oil spill" in the Gulf is indeed a problem, but a problem that's being handled, and not something that needs to be talked about night and day. That's right--Move along folks; nothing to see here.