Congressional candidate Allen West gave what might be his most absurd speech yet Friday at a meeting for a local chapter of Glenn Beck's 912 Project. Jump ahead to about the 3:30 mark. This is what you'll hear:
The American way is that if you challenge us, we'll figure it out. I was flipping through YouTube and I saw a couple of good ol' boys from up there in the Panhandle. They said [affecting Southern drawl], "You know, this is the way you figure out how to take the oil out of the ocean. You pour some oil in a bucket full of water. You take some hay. You throw it in there. You swirl it around a little bit and guess what? The oil connected itself to the hay and you pull it out." See? That's American ingenuity. [Applause]
OK, West is joking... right? I mean, no one seriously thinks that some redneck's experiment with a bucket of water and some hay can be replicated in a body of water the size of the Gulf of Mexico.
Back to West:
Meanwhile, you've got British Petroleum sitting up there saying, "Let's see, maybe we can shoot mud down into it. Maybe we could put a big thing over it. But all this time, all we had to do was turn to the average American citizen and say, "How do we do this? How do we take care of this?"
You see, that's the beauty of who we are... That's the challenge when you have people who don't believe we're an exceptional people.
So it's evident that West really does put stock in the hay-in-bucket plan. Incredible. And it's evident that he actually believes that no disaster is so spectacular that it can't be cured with Americans' exceptional talents. I guess if that's the case, we shouldn't even worry about trying to prevent the next oil spill. Let's just have faith that no matter what happens, there's a "good ol' boy" with an idea that can save us all.
