The Republicans have been working hard to try and blame Obama for the oil spill. As I pointed out yesterday, Obama does deserve a little blame for not having booms on hand, but that blame also needs to be shared with Bush and Clinton, since none of them prepared to follow a 1994 plan on dealing with spills put out by the government.

But now we are getting more evidence that points directly to Dr. Evil himself, Dick Cheney. First the investigation into the cause of the fire is starting to zero in on Halliburton and the cementing process they had just completed. Interesting enough this same process caused a fire and spill last year in Australia and was also completed by Halliburton. That investigation is too zeroing in on the cementing process by Halliburton.

Even more interesting is the safety requirements that Cheney fought to get rid of. The problem with the oil spill has been the inability to shut the leak off. The blowout preventer has failed and there was no secondary device. Here’s an explanation by Robert F. Kennedy Jr.;

The absence of an acoustical regulator — a remotely triggered dead man’s switch that might have closed off BP’s gushing pipe at its sea floor wellhead when the manual switch failed (the fire and explosion on the drilling platform may have prevented the dying workers from pushing the button) — was directly attributable to industry pandering by the Bush team. Acoustic switches are required by law for all offshore rigs off Brazil and in Norway’s North Sea operations. BP uses the device voluntarily in Britain’s North Sea and elsewhere in the world as do other big players like Holland’s Shell and France’s Total. In 2000, the Minerals Management Service while weighing a comprehensive rulemaking for drilling safety, deemed the acoustic mechanism “essential” and proposed to mandate the mechanism on all gulf rigs.

Then, between January and March of 2001, incoming Vice President Dick Cheney conducted secret meetings with over 100 oil industry officials allowing them to draft a wish list of industry demands to be implemented by the oil friendly administration. Cheney also used that time to re-staff the Minerals Management Service with oil industry toadies including a cabal of his Wyoming carbon cronies. In 2003, newly reconstituted Minerals Management Service genuflected to the oil cartel by recommending the removal of the proposed requirement for acoustic switches. The Minerals Management Service’s 2003 study concluded that “acoustic systems are not recommended because they tend to be very costly.”

The acoustic trigger costs about $500,000. Estimated costs of the oil spill to Gulf Coast residents are now upward of $14 billion to gulf state communities. Bush’s 2005 energy bill officially dropped the requirement for the acoustic switch off devices explaining that the industry’s existing practices are “failsafe.”

A lot of oil companies actually put these acoustical regulators in without being required to. Think of the millions a day it’s costing BP for cleanup and loss of product. I would say in less than an hour they would have paid for this device and that would have greatly reduced the magnitude of this disaster.

But is also goes to the heart of the matter – the Republican desire to remove regulations.

For years there has been questions about Cheney’s secret energy meeting he held shortly after taking office. In the past he has claimed executive privilege on it, but now I believe Congress needs to make him talk.

Which now brings us to the point of oversight by Congress. Earlier this week Rep. Darrell Issa (R-CA) tweeted about the lax oversight at MMS and claimed that they “have been on them for years” about it. Well now we are finding out that the oversight become so lax because of Cheney. And Issa is a man who has been in a position to do something. He is the ranking member on the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform. Of course prior to the spill, Issa’s only interest has been in finding some big Clintonesque style scandal to pin on the Obama administration. Maybe that’s because Issa knows deep down that if he starts digging into MMS, he will find Cheney’s dirty fingerprints all over it.

So now we see why Republicans have been so active in trying to put all the blame on Obama. I got a funny feeling they know deep down that when the investigations really get going, Dick Cheney is a name that will come up a lot. Once that happens then the new talking point from the right will be “deflection” – trying to say the Obama administration and Democrats are trying to protect the President. That will of course be nothing but a lie since evidence is mounting against Cheney himself.

And for added goodness, here’s a video clip from Countdown last night where Olbermann runs through all this, plus a lot more.

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