Greetings, loyal minions. Your Maximum Leader has been following the whole gulf oil leak with growing feelings of dread and gloom. He was hopeful that the first capping device was going to work. Then it froze up and got clogged. Since then it has been one failure after another.

Are you ready for a prediction?

This gusher will be still be gushing on Election Day.

Yes. Election Day.

Your Maximum Leader has no confidence that anything is going to stop this in the near term. He also doubts that the “relief wells” that “should” be active in August will do the trick.

This is the worst ecological disaster since Chernobyl. And in some respects it might turn out being worse.

Just wait until hurricane season gets fully underway. Your Maximum Leader foresees oil everywhere along the gulf coast from Guatemala to the Florida Keys. At this stage he would not be surprised to find oil from this gusher wind up on the Outer Banks of North Carolina.

Your Maximum Leader will wait to get a full and final report on what happened before he starts placing blame on any entity. It seems as though BP will come out holding the short straw in all this. But you can’t tell that right now with certainty. If BP is culpable, then we can all hope that they remain very profitable. Because if they go tits-up due to this the US taxpayer will be stuck with a clean-up bill. (Okay… Let’s be honest… The US taxpayer is going to be stuck with a big bill on this anyway. Lucky for us health care reform will save us so much money!)

Your Maximum Leader hopes you’ve seen the white-sand beaches of the Florida panhandle, because they aren’t going to be white for much longer.

Carry on.

UPDATE: Your Maximum Leader was recently reminded that Chernobyl is still worse in so many ways. Not the least of which is that the containment dome is collapsing and another will have to be built. This cycle will continue for centuries.