TIME magazine says Rush is right ... watch out for flying pigs.

At Ace of Spades we find a link to a TIME magazine article which - while it calls Rush "obnoxious anti-environmentalist" - has admitted that Rush is right about the extent of the environmental effects of the Gulf oil spill.

Limbaugh has a point. The Deepwater Horizon explosion was an awful tragedy for the 11 workers who died on the rig, ...But so far ... it does not seem to be inflicting severe environmental damage. "The impacts have been much, much less than everyone feared," says geochemist Jacqueline Michel, a federal contractor who is coordinating shoreline assessments in Louisiana.

Yes, the spill killed birds — but so far, less than 1% of the number killed by the Exxon Valdez spill in Alaska 21 years ago. Yes, we've heard horror stories about oiled dolphins — but so far, wildlife-response teams have collected only three visibly oiled carcasses of mammals. Yes, the spill prompted harsh restrictions on fishing and shrimping, but so far, the region's fish and shrimp have tested clean, and the restrictions are gradually being lifted. And yes, scientists have warned that the oil could accelerate the destruction of Louisiana's disintegrating coastal marshes — a real slow-motion ecological calamity — but so far, assessment teams have found only about 350 acres of oiled marshes, when Louisiana was already losing about 15,000 acres of wetlands every year.

Now, the despicable bottom feeding scumbag Michael Grunwald no doubt used Limbaugh's name simply to call Rush obnoxious, but we wonder why a government lapdog like TIME would carry a story like this.  And then it occurs to me that this is one way of taking the heat off Obama because it's now no longer possible to pretend that Team Obama acted competently after the well blew up.  So if the spill is now big deal, Obama's failure is no big deal.

It's the new media theme, if Team Obama screws up "X," "X" is no big deal.

UPDATE: Jonah Goldberg reminds us that what nature and BP did in the Gulf is mild compared to what Obama did.  That's the REAL disaster.

The greatest damage from the Deepwater Horizon disaster (and yes, even with the hype-deflation, it's still a disaster) has been from government. The drilling ban imposed by the administration, against the counsel of the sort of "sound science" Obama usually sanctifies, has been devastating to the region, costing thousands of jobs and untold millions in lost revenues and taxes. That's definitely something the people couldn't have done better for themselves.

Meanwhile, if Obama is serious about driving America forward to a green economy "even if we don't yet know precisely how we're going to get there," he will take the Gulf region devastation on the road, destroying good jobs across the country (the oil and gas industry pays twice the national average) and replacing them with bad ones. He will replace cheap energy with expensive energy. (During the campaign, he promised that his plan would cause electricity rates to "skyrocket.") He will place bets on unproven technologies while discarding proven ones. In short, he will nationalize a disastrous disaster policy.