That's pretty hard core for anyone, regardless of age.  I wouldn't do it at 25, although I know some who do.  That being said, while I understand the concern about solo sailing, I'm not 100% sure I agree that age is the major issue.

But that would not have gotten him elected, would it? Sure would have reduced the possibility of this disaster from happening.

And the article is sensationalist political spin, for sure. Sentences like:

Like the attacks by Al Qaeda, the disaster in the Gulf was preceded by ample warnings - yet the administration had ignored them.

Considering that BushCo and the neocons prayed for a disaster like 9/11, and that disaster served their purposes big time, read Patriot Act, war in Iraq, etc., the comparison is absurd, and serves the function as sensationalist journalism.

As BP was cutting corners aboard the rig, the Obama administration was plotting the greatest expansion of offshore drilling in half a century. In 2008, as prices at the pump neared $5 a gallon, President Bush had lifted an executive moratorium on offshore drilling outside the Gulf that had been implemented by his father following the Exxon Valdez. On the campaign trail, Obama had stressed that offshore drilling "will not make a real dent in current gas prices or meet the long-term challenge of energy independence."

Yes, this is a doozy. Obama eventually campaigned for opening up offshore drilling, but why bother mentioning that when it sounds better to say that Obama was lying. Also the 50 year expansion was a GOP wet dream, illegal because of the moratorium. Had BushCo been reelected (McSame) the offshore drilling would have quadrupled, compared to Obama and Salazar.

In a way this kind of political reporting is not a bad thing as it uses hyperbole to sell paper and hopefully pushes against apathy regarding environmental concerns. Here is another political piece by Tim Dickson obviously meant to push things in the direction he saw fit:

There's only one thing that makes sense of the Clinton campaign's clumsy and classless injection of race into her primary battle with Barack Obama. And that is that her victory in New Hampshire -- impressive though it was -- threatened to transform her into a special-interest candidate.

Hillary would not have won that battle without exaggerated support from women. Despite having campaigned vigorously as a candidate who just-so-happened to be a woman, her lifeline came from affinity voters....

How then to compete against Obama, who has -- as Al Sharpton recently complained -- run a race-neutral campaign? A man standing as a general-interest candidate despite his historic racial qualifications.

The answer, it seems, has been to inject race into the campaign by any means necessary.

I am no fan of the guy either, and voted for Hillary in the primaries. I did not see much difference between Hillary and Obama policy wise, but I liked Hillary's style 100 times better. I voted for Obama because I saw him as a waaaaay better choice than McSame, other's here did not, I do not believe you belong to that group of die hard Hillary supporters.

The answer is of course, Bush and Cheney, oil men, spent 8 years eviscerating the EPA, OSHA, and all regulatory agencies, based on the principal that big business' interest will regulate itself, wrote the script for the BP deepwater disaster, just like they wrote the script for Katerina.

But, here's the thing, squeaky: Bush may have written the script, but Obama came into office asserting that he - and his nominee to Interior, Ken Salazar - were going to clean up the agency (among other things).  But they didn't.

Have you read the Rolling Stone piece?  There's plenty of blame for Bush in it, but there's a whole lot more, and one simply cannot dismiss what actually has happened on Obama's watch.

From the article (emphasis is mine):

Salazar took over Interior in January 2009, vowing to restore the department's "respect for scientific integrity." He immediately traveled to MMS headquarters outside Denver and delivered a beat-down to staffers for their "blatant and criminal conflicts of interest and self-dealing" that had "set one of the worst examples of corruption and abuse in government." Promising to "set the standard for reform," Salazar declared, "The American people will know the Minerals Management Service as a defender of the taxpayer. You are the ones who will make special interests play by the rules." Dressed in his trademark Stetson and bolo tie, Salazar boldly proclaimed, "There's a new sheriff in town."

[snip]

"We have embarked on an ambitious agenda to clean up the mess," he insisted. "We have the inspector general involved with us in a preventive mode so that the department doesn't commit the same mistakes of the past." The crackdown, he added, "goes beyond just codes of ethics."

Except that it didn't. Salazar did little to tamp down on the lawlessness at MMS, beyond referring a few employees for criminal prosecution and ending a Bush-era program that allowed oil companies to make their "royalty" payments - the amount they owe taxpayers for extracting a scarce public resource - not in cash but in crude. And instead of putting the brakes on new offshore drilling, Salazar immediately throttled it up to record levels. Even though he had scrapped the Bush plan, Salazar put 53 million offshore acres up for lease in the Gulf in his first year alone - an all-time high.  The aggressive leasing came as no surprise, given Salazar's track record. "This guy has a long, long history of promoting offshore oil drilling - that's his thing," says Kierán Suckling, executive director of the Center for Biological Diversity. "He's got a highly specific soft spot for offshore oil drilling." As a senator, Salazar not only steered passage of the Gulf of Mexico Energy Security Act, which opened 8 million acres in the Gulf to drilling, he even criticized President Bush for not forcing oil companies to develop existing leases faster.

Salazar was far less aggressive, however, when it came to making good on his promise to fix MMS. Though he criticized the actions of "a few rotten apples" at the agency, he left long-serving lackeys of the oil industry in charge. "The people that are ethically challenged are the career managers, the people who come up through the ranks," says a marine biologist who left the agency over the way science was tampered with by top officials. "In order to get promoted at MMS, you better get invested in this pro-development oil culture." One of the Bush-era managers whom Salazar left in place was John Goll, the agency's director for Alaska. Shortly after, the Interior secretary announced a reorganization of MMS in the wake of the Gulf disaster, Goll called a staff meeting and served cake decorated with the words "Drill, baby, drill."

Salazar also failed to remove Chris Oynes, a top MMS official who had been a central figure in a multibillion-dollar scandal that Interior's inspector general called "a jaw-dropping example of bureaucratic bungling." In the 1990s, industry lobbyists secured a sweetheart subsidy from Congress: Drillers would pay no royalties on oil extracted in deep water until prices rose above $28 a barrel. But this tripwire was conveniently omitted in Gulf leases overseen by Oynes - a mistake that will let the oil giants pocket as much as $53 billion. Instead of being fired for this f**kup, however, Oynes was promoted by Bush to become associate director for offshore drilling - a position he kept under Salazar until the Gulf disaster hit.

How many more times, and on how many more issues, are we going to have to hear that it's not Obama's fault because he inherited the mess?  How many more administration officials are going to keep beating that drum?  

Obama will happily stand up and say that he accepts responsibility, but after hearing him do that on a number of occasions, I've come to the conclusion that it is little more than a tactic designed to shut people up, to make them stop looking at what went wrong and how it went wrong.

Whatever Bush and Cheney did could have been undone, or set on a better path.  Reading about how Salazar (who I presume had the approval of his boss) made a couple high-profile moves designed to convince people that things were changing, but left the bulk of the dysfunctional pieces and personnel in place, and went about conducting business as usual - the "usual" being the same way it was conducted under Bush -  it is impossible for reasonable people to conclude that Obama can take any refuge in what happened before he took office.

Party at kdog's pad!