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#140 FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE: June 10, 2010

TruthsRUS cleans up uncertainty spill
By Curtis Seltzer

BLUE GRASS, Va.—If you are like me, you wonder why things that shouldn’t happen do, and who’s responsible.

Why, for example, does the hippopotamus carry lots of hip but no pot? Who’s to blame for that, I ask you?

For answers, I now go to TruthsRUS.com. TRUS is a shiny new website whose
free answers have been certified as “the most truth for your money” by an independent rating agency, known among insiders as Rick’s Cafe Americain, where everything is as “honest as the day is long.”

I interviewed the start-up’s young founder, Cutting Edges, a day after its launch. The corporate office occupies the top floor of the spiffiest building on K Street in downtown Washington. Two hundred employees, not one over 23, were tending computers that left no paper trails.

Me:  So who’s to blame for the oil spill in the Gulf?

Cutting:  Let’s start with Bush and Cheney.

Me:  …because?

Cutting:  Because they want to give Obama his own Katrina—to have and to hold, until death do them part. They even had Heckuvajob Brownie lined up in case Obama needed help. The more this slick sticks to Obama, the less oiled up those two look in hindsight.

Me:  Next candidate?

Cutting:  Clinton. Bill hates Obama even more than he hates Hillary. If Obama sinks in this tar pit, Hillary can run in 2012 when she will still be, he promises, only 42.

Me:  How could Bill Clinton engineer the spill?

Cutting:  Now this is on the real QT. Bill told me that he worked it through the vast right-wing conspiracy that fears Obama more than it ever feared him. Bill slipped them a recent bimbo, which they stuffed down the drilling pipe where it erupted. Boom! Big-time media coverage. Makes Monica look like small potatoes.

Me:  Plausible. Next?

Cutting:  Obama. He needed to trump up a big enemy for Democrats to run against in the election this fall. So he finds an excuse to pick a fight with everybody’s favorite villain, Oil Can Harry. Does he target some silly little independent out of Oklahoma? No, he goes after a big-but-humble Brit. He wants to make it look like the War of 1812 down there.

Me:  Obama certainly has motive and means. Anyone else behind it?

Cutting:  The meat industry.

Me:  What?

Cutting:  Do you know a better way to eliminate competition for meat than to poison the supply of seafood? Wait until the media get a load of the first Gulf crustacean with Mad Shrimp Disease. Fish down—beef up, chicken up, pork up.

Me:  Who else?

Cutting:  The liberal Media elite, of course.

Me:  Of course. It’s the story of the year. Lots of drama.

Cutting:  Pelicans basting in natural oil. Oysters making tarballs instead of pearls. This story might snatch newspapers from the jaws of the Internet’s sharks.                    

Me:  It’s better than Watergate.

Cutting:  As we speak, Bob Woodward is meeting in a spooky parking garage with Deep Hole. Anderson Cooper is scuba diving with oil-eating bacteria while Oprah asks them live whether their tummy-wummies hurt from too much yum-yum. And the always tasteful Joan Rivers is working up a couple of jokes about the sex lives of slippery female egrets. She claims they’re first cousins. She’s also coming out with a new jewelry line using hardened trinkets of runaway crude. 

Me:  It is the perfect story. Everyone pointing fingers. Lots of money in play. Big bad guys; good little guys.

Cutting:  And don’t forget jobs. Big Labor’s fingerprints are all over that blowout preventer. This spill is creating the only new private-sector employment in two years—manufacturing clean beaches. One spill like this every year might keep the unemployment rate below nine percent. How’s them apples?

Me:  Who else do you think is behind it?

Cutting:  Well, the environmentalists obviously.

Me:  Huh? Don’t they like birds and turtles?

Cutting:  They do. But they’re against oil and beachfront development and commercial fishing. They figure a big spill with legs could knock out all three. What are 200 turtles if the greens can maneuver the Gulf Coast back into the Stone Age? By the way, they’re also against suntans and beach umbrellas.

Me:  Is that it?

Cutting:  You kidding me? Wall Street is in this up to its neck.

Me:  How do you figure that?

Cutting:  The spill has shifted the spotlight off Goldman Sachs, which is what The Street needed. Everybody in America understands how corner-cutting and ineffective regulation could cause a drilling accident. But Wall Street never wanted people to understand how they made money and blew up an economy by selling high-risk, low-security, non-obligatory debt that carried an AAA rating. I’ve heard that Blankfein dressed himself as a deck hand and dropped one of his improvised exploding derivatives down the pipe. Then he swam back to shore disguised as “Flipper,” with just his head showing.

Me:  It’s a lot to think about it.

Cutting:  And then you have the all-electric-limousine liberals who want Obama to come back to them. And the Tea Party folks who need an issue that baptizes them with a little mainstream credibility. And the academics who need research money. And the handwringers who need something to feel bad about. And Bobby Jindal who wants federal money to build a sand barrier that will be finished after the pipe is plugged and will disappear when the first hurricane comes through. Not to mention fishermen who want to get paid for sitting in the marina drinking coffee and talking to bankruptcy lawyers.

Me:  So is it everybody you named, working together?

Cutting:  Man, you really are in some other orbit.

Me:  Is that bad? Look, TruthsRUS is supposed to provide one right answer. So who is to blame for the spill?

Cutting:  It’s either everyone or no one.

Me:  Next you’re going to say God.

Cutting:  I never exclude anyone arbitrarily.

Me:  I’m not getting my money’s worth. By the way, who’s bankrolling TruthsRUS?

Cutting:  An offshore outfit.

Me:  Does it have a name?

Cutting:  BP. 

Curtis Seltzer is a land consultant who works with buyers and helps sellers with marketing plans. He is author of How To Be a DIRT-SMART Buyer of Country Property at www.curtis-seltzer.com where his weekly columns are posted. He also writes for www.landthink.com. 

Contact: Curtis Seltzer, Ph.D.
Land Consultant
1467 Wimer Mountain Road
Blue Grass, VA 24413-2307
540-474-3297
curtisseltzer@htcnet.org
www.curtis-seltzer.com

This original column is provided free for one-time use with author credit at the end. It may be used for background with author credit. Copyright applies.