You may have heard yesterday that tar balls were found on the beach in Key West.  This unsurprisingly caused a media frenzy.  By the time I heard about it, scientists had already identified them as being from a completely different oil spill.  End of story I would have thought, but I'm not Rush Limbaugh, am I?

Rush Limbaugh spent a whole chunk of time pointing at the "state run media" for getting all worked up over nothing.  As far as Limbaugh is concerned, this little incident is just yet another proof that the media is blowing things out of proportion.  It leads right into two of his favorite topics:

• Offshore drilling is perfectly safe, and we need to do more of it (this is a key plank in his Sarah Palin bootlicking platform)
• Climate change is a fraud perpetrated by libbrul scientists and the libbrul media cabal.

Two points that Rush conveniently overlooks in this:

1. Those tarballs came from other oil spills.  There are a lot of other oil spills.  As Limbaugh himself points out, tarballs wash up on the beach all across the Eastern seaboard.  Why?  Because offshore drilling is messy, and inclined to accident.  

The Gulf oil spill isn't even in the worst yet, it's just getting more attention because A) it's us and not some foreign country, and B) the Gulf is a pretty important chunk of the ocean, both environmentally and commercially.

All those super common tarballs Rush is always noticing on his private stretch of Florida beach?  THAT IS WHY PEOPLE ARE AGAINST OFFSHORE DRILLING.  He acts like they just wash up with the seashells, like they're just another bit of nautical debris.  

Rush Limbaugh's complacency and ignorance of environmental issues should be damning.  The only reason it isn't is that his core audience is even dumber than he is.

2.  While Rush Limbaugh is pointing "Look!  Over there!  It's nothing!"  behind him, oil is washing up into the Louisiana marshland.  It's smothering the delicate nurseries where fish spawn and gulf coast shrimp start their lives.  Governor Bobby Jindal toured the area around the Mississippi delta and came back with a giant Ziploc bag full of black oil collected from the wetlands.

Limbaugh wants to pretend that this oil spill is no big deal.  He wants people to think that fears about oil spills are overblown.  Is he on the oil companies' payroll?  Because he sure acts like a shill for the oil industry.  I wasn't aware that AM radio shows were a petroleum product.  

Unfortunately, the tarballs on the Key West beach aren't the real story.  The real destruction is happening, right now, on the Louisiana coast.  Commercial fishing and shrimping has been halted in many parts of the gulf, right when people need their jobs the most.  

Meanwhile, while people like Rush Limbaugh blow and puff and talk talk talk, some people are actually working to make a difference.  Including Kevin Costner, who in 1995 invested in a company building a machine that can separate oil from water.  Costner was horrified and outraged by the Exxon Valdez spill, and he found a way to act on that outrage.

Creative Commons-licensed image courtesy of Flickr user Belltown Messenger