What Do McChrystal And BP Have In Common – Aside From Fact That Both Were Democrat Supporters?

The following article by Mark Steyn is brilliant.  My title isn’t an accurate summary of Steyn’s point (but maybe it got you to read an article you otherwise wouldn’t have read!).

It is certainly beyond hilarious that pro-Obama Democrat Stanley McChrystal and pro-Obama BP are now on the outs in a cloud of self-destruction, while George Bush’s Secretary of Defense and George Bush’s general have been called upon to save the day.

But the real meat of the article gets to the heart of one issue: Barack Obama is an empty suit who stands for nothing beyond self-promoting Barack Obama.

Published: June 25, 2010
Updated: 10:57 a.m.
Learning the rules of an unengaged president
By MARK STEYN
Syndicated columnist

What do Gen. McChrystal and British Petroleum have in common? Aside from the fact that they’re both Democratic Party supporters.

Or they were. Stanley McChrystal is a liberal who voted for Obama and banned Fox News from his HQ TV. Which may at least partly explain how he became the first U.S. general to be lost in combat while giving an interview to Rolling Stone: They’ll be studying that one in war colleges around the world for decades. The management of BP were unable to vote for Obama, being, as we now know, the most sinister duplicitous bunch of shifty Brits to pitch up offshore since the War of 1812. But, in their “Beyond Petroleum” marketing and beyond, they signed on to every modish nostrum of the eco-Left. Their recently retired chairman, Lord Browne, was one of the most prominent promoters of cap-and-trade. BP was the Democrats’ favorite oil company. They were to Obama what Total Fina Elf was to Saddam.

But what do McChrystal’s and BP’s defenestration tell us about the president of the United States? Barack Obama is a thin-skinned man and, according to Britain’s Daily Telegraph, White House aides indicated that what angered the president most about the Rolling Stone piece was “a McChrystal aide saying that McChrystal had thought that Obama was not engaged when they first met last year.” If finding Obama “not engaged” is now a firing offense, who among us is safe?

Only the other day, Florida Sen. George Lemieux attempted to rouse the president to jump-start America’s overpaid, overmanned and oversleeping federal bureaucracy and get it to do something on the oil debacle. There are 2,000 oil skimmers in the United States: Weeks after the spill, only 20 of them are off the coast of Florida. Seventeen friendly nations with great expertise in the field have offered their own skimmers; the Dutch volunteered their “super-skimmers”: Obama turned them all down. Raising the problem, Sen. Lemieux found the president unengaged, and uninformed. “He doesn’t seem to know the situation about foreign skimmers and domestic skimmers,” reported the senator.

He doesn’t seem to know, and he doesn’t seem to care that he doesn’t know, and he doesn’t seem to care that he doesn’t care. “It can seem that at the heart of Barack Obama’s foreign policy is no heart at all,” wrote Richard Cohen in The Washington Post last week. “For instance, it’s not clear that Obama is appalled by China’s appalling human-rights record. He seems hardly stirred about continued repression in Russia.

The president seems to stand foursquare for nothing much.

“This, of course, is the Obama enigma: Who is this guy? What are his core beliefs?”

Gee, if only your newspaper had thought to ask those fascinating questions oh, say, a month before the Iowa caucuses.

And even today Cohen is still giving President Whoisthisguy a pass.

After all, whatever he feels about “China’s appalling human-rights record” or “continued repression in Russia,” Obama is not directly responsible for it. Whereas the U.S. and allied deaths in Afghanistan are happening on his watch – and the border villagers killed by unmanned drones are being killed at his behest. Cohen calls the president “above all, a pragmatist,” but with the best will in the world you can’t stretch the definition of “pragmatism” to mean “lack of interest.”

“The ugly truth,” wrote Thomas Friedman in The New York Times, “is that no one in the Obama White House wanted this Afghan surge. The only reason they proceeded was because no one knew how to get out of it.”

Well, that’s certainly ugly, but is it the truth? Afghanistan, you’ll recall, was supposed to be the Democrats’ war, the one they allegedly supported, the one the neocons’ Iraq adventure was an unnecessary distraction from. Granted the Dems’ usual shell game – to avoid looking soft on national security, it helps to be in favor of some war other than the one you’re opposing – Candidate Obama was an especially ripe promoter. In one of the livelier moments of his campaign, he chugged down half a bottle of Geopolitical Viagra and claimed he was hot for invading Pakistan.

Then he found himself in the Oval Office, and the dime-store opportunism was no longer helpful. But, as Friedman puts it, “no one knew how to get out of it.” The “pragmatist” settled for “nuance”: He announced a semisurge plus a date for withdrawal of troops to begin. It’s not “victory,” it’s not “defeat,” but rather a more sophisticated mélange of these two outmoded absolutes: If you need a word, “quagmire” would seem to cover it.

Hamid Karzai, the Taliban and the Pakistanis, on the one hand, and Britain and the other American allies heading for the check-out, on the other, all seem to have grasped the essentials of the message, even if Friedman and the other media Obammyboppers never quite did. Karzai is now talking to Islamabad about an accommodation that would see the most viscerally anti-American elements of the Taliban back in Kabul as part of a power-sharing regime. At the height of the shrillest shrieking about the Iraqi “quagmire,” was there ever any talk of hard-core Saddamite Baathists returning to government in Baghdad?

To return to Cohen’s question: “Who is this guy? What are his core beliefs?” Well, he’s a guy who was wafted ever upward – from the Harvard Law Review to state legislator to United States senator – without ever lingering long enough to accomplish anything. “Who is this guy?” Well, when a guy becomes a credible presidential candidate by his mid-40s with no accomplishments other than a couple of memoirs, he evidently has an extraordinary talent for self-promotion, if nothing else. “What are his core beliefs?” It would seem likely that his core belief is in himself. It’s the “nothing else” that the likes of Cohen are belatedly noticing.

Wasn’t he kind of unengaged by the health care debate? That’s why, for all his speeches, he could never quite articulate a rationale for it. In the end, he was happy to leave it to the Democratic Congress and, when his powers of persuasion failed, let them ram it down the throats of the American people through sheer parliamentary muscle.

Likewise, on Afghanistan, his attitude seems to be “I don’t want to hear about it.” Unmanned drones take care of a lot of that, for a while. So do his courtiers in the media: Did all those hopeychangers realize that Obama’s war would be run by Bush’s defense secretary and Bush’s general?

Hey, never mind: the Moveon.org folks have quietly removed their celebrated “General Betray-us” ad from their website. Cindy Sheehan, the supposed conscience of the nation when she was railing against Bush from the front pages, is an irrelevant kook unworthy of coverage when she protests Obama. Why, a cynic might almost think the “anti-war” movement was really an anti-Bush movement, and that they really don’t care about dead foreigners after all. Plus ça change you can believe in, plus c’est la même chose.

Except in one respect. There is a big hole where our strategy should be.

It’s hard to fight a war without war aims, and, in the end, they can only come from the top. It took the oil spill to alert Americans to the unengaged president. From Moscow to Tehran to the caves of Waziristan, our enemies got the message a lot earlier – and long ago figured out the rules of unengagement.

Too bad we elected a president who has a narcissism complex where his conscience should be and a vacuum where his soul should be.

Obama Total Failure As Leader: Even Uber Liberals Throwing Obama Overboard In Gulf Disaster

If you see Obama covered in oil, it’s because a gang of liberals shoved him overboard into the sticky muck.

It appears that things are really getting desperate for the left.  Leftwing journalists, who have always been such reliable propagandists for Democrats, might finally be at that point where they realize if they don’t report the truth, their viewers will go to those that will.

From the gang of liberals at MSNBC:

MSNBC Trashes Obama’s Address: Compared To Carter, “I Don’t Sense Executive Command” Chris Matthews, Keith Olbermann and Howard Fineman react to President Obama’s Oval Office Address on the oil spill. Here are the highlights of what the trio said:

Olbermann: “It was a great speech if you were on another planet for the last 57 days.”

Matthews compared Obama to Carter.

Olbermann: “Nothing specific at all was said.”

Matthews: “No direction.”

Howard Fineman: “He wasn’t specific enough.”

Olbermann: “I don’t think he aimed low, I don’t think he aimed at all. It’s startling.”

Howard Fineman: Obama should be acting like a “commander-in-chief.”

Matthews: Ludicrous that he keeps saying [Secretary of Energy] Chu has a Nobel prize. “I’ll barf if he does it one more time.”

Matthews: “A lot of meritocracy, a lot of blue ribbon talk.”

Matthews: “I don’t sense executive command.”

VIDEO: Obama: Oil Disaster “Most Painful And Powerful Reminder” That We Need Clean Energy

VIDEO: Krauthammer: Obama Gave It A Shot, But The Story Will Not Be His Speech

VIDEO: Frank Luntz Focus Group On Obama’s Address: “Negative”

Here’s the Youtube video in which the above comments were made:

From the New York Times:

From the beginning, the effort has been bedeviled by a lack of preparation, organization, urgency and clear lines of authority among federal, state and local officials, as well as BP. As a result, officials and experts say, the damage to the coastline and wildlife has been worse than it might have been if the response had been faster and orchestrated more effectively.

“The present system is not working,” Senator Bill Nelson of Florida said Thursday at a hearing in Washington devoted to assessing the spill and the response. Oil had just entered Florida waters, Senator Nelson said, adding that no one was notified at either the state or local level, a failure of communication that echoed Mr. Bonano’s story and countless others along the Gulf Coast.

“The information is not flowing,” Senator Nelson said. “The decisions are not timely. The resources are not produced. And as a result, you have a big mess, with no command and control.”

They were supposed to be better prepared. When the Exxon Valdez ran aground in Alaska in 1989, skimmers, booms and dispersants were in short supply for the response, which was led by a consortium of oil companies in which BP was the majority stakeholder.

A year later, lawmakers passed the federal Oil Pollution Act to ensure that plans were in place for oil spills, so the response effort would be quick, with clear responsibilities for everyone involved.

No skimmers were available when the Exxon Valdes ran aground.  And – thanks to our fool-in-chief Barry Hussein – when we had a chance to get some much needed assistance to supply much-needed skimmers, Barry apparently thought they said, “We’d like to send you winners” and turned them down fearing they would make him look bad.

U.S. and BP slow to accept Dutch expertiseBy LOREN STEFFY –  Houston Chronicle – 06/08/2010

Three days after the explosion of the Deepwater Horizon in the Gulf of Mexico, the Dutch government offered to help.

It was willing to provide ships outfitted with oil-skimming booms, and it proposed a plan for building sand barriers to protect sensitive marshlands.

The response from the Obama administration and BP, which are coordinating the cleanup: “The embassy got a nice letter from the administration that said, ‘Thanks, but no thanks,’” said Geert Visser, consul general for the Netherlands in Houston.

Now, almost seven weeks later, as the oil spewing from the battered well spreads across the Gulf and soils pristine beaches and coastline, BP and our government have reconsidered.

So we’ve got this complete, unmitigated, and inexcusable disaster:

Had Obama accepted the offer back then and not allowed BP to use illegal dispersants, the oil would have never made landfall 48 miles away.

Today, (a month and half to late) there are US tankers that are steaming to the site with four pairs of modern skimming booms that were airlifted from the Netherlands and should be sucking up oil at the flow site within days.

Each pair can process 5 million gallons of water a day, removing 20,000 tons of oil and sludge.

If those skimmers were in place when they were offered a month ago, each pair could presumably recover 4.4 million barrels of oil. Four pairs of the state of the art skimmers would be able to suck up 17.6 million barrels in a month, although they will not be able to reach the depths of the plumes that are floating away with the illegal dispersants.

Thirteen nations offered to give us help to mitigate this massive disaster.  And Obama basically wrote, “To whom it may concern, please to get the hell out of my business” letters to all of them.

And, of course, this failure is too big for just one inexcusable and stupid and unforgivable abandonment of leadership, judgment, and basic common sense.  In addition to the “Thanks, but up yours” response to other nations’ offers to supply skimmers, Obama also allowed MILES of boom that would have been hugely important in protecting the coasts to sit useless in warehouses:

UNBELIEVABLE! How’s this for HOPE AND CHANGE?

Tar blobs began washing up on Florida’s white sand beaches near Pensacola this past weekend. Crude oil has already been reported along barrier islands in Alabama and Mississippi, and has impacted about 125 miles of Louisiana coastline.

It didn’t have to be this way.

(Reuters)
There are miles of floating oil containment boom in warehouse right now and the manufacturer Packgen says it can make lots more on short notice.
There’s just one problem… No one will come get it.

It’s unfair to compare Bush’s failure at the 500-year hurricane striking the worst possible location with Obama’s failure in this oil leak disaster – Obama’s failure is incommensurately worse.

And the American people know it.  A new poll–by a left leaning public opinion firm–finds that:

Our new Louisiana poll has a lot of data points to show how unhappy voters in the state are with Barack Obama’s handling of the oil spill but one perhaps sums it up better than anything else- a majority of voters there think George W. Bush did a better job with Katrina than Obama’s done dealing with the spill.

50% of voters in the state, even including 31% of Democrats, give Bush higher marks on that question compared to 35% who pick Obama.

Since Obama was elected, I’ve been saying that a third of American voters would continue to support Obama even if he led us into the stone-age-like conditions that Kim Il Jong has led his people into.  We could be living in the dark and freezing at night, and scratching our own fecal matter from the ground in order to have something to burn, and this group of people would still adore their Dear Leader.

And what is Obama’s response to this terrible crisis?  Well, his golf game certainly hasn’t suffered in any way.  He’s been very busy doing fundraisers so his fellow liberal buddies can have a chance to stay in office.  He got a nice vacation in.

Oh, and he gave a speech.  A speech in which Obama sought to seize advantage of the disaster in order to impose his monstrous and disastrous cap-and-trade system that would cause energy prices to “necessarily skyrocket.”  Obama is no leader who can possibly solve this crisis; he is rather a demagogic community organizer who can only seek to ideologically benefit from the crisis.

And MSNBC and the New York Times aren’t the only liberals who realize the disastrous and disgraceful failure that Obama has been.  Longtime liberal Democrat political strategist James Carville realized it.  Liberal journalist and former Clinton administration public affairs hack Kirsten Powers realized it.  I’m sure a lot of other liberal media pukes are realizing that we’re coming to the place where they either throw Obama overboard for his incompetence, or demonstrate that they themselves are clearly incompetent in their analysis.

I like the way the American Thinker concludes on Obama’s performance:

The utter lack of leadership and hands-on management in responding to the Gulf oil crisis is an embarrassment to the President, as well as a hideous disaster for the Gulf and those who live near it. Can Obama’s first-ever Oval Office address make the damage to his standing go away? I seriously doubt it. Obama has failed in his duty to protect the homeland through sheer inexperience, incompetence, and indolence. The man who has planty of time for golf, hoops, parties, and fund-raisers is asleep at the switch when it comes to making the system respond effectively to an emergency. There is no papering over the spectacle with rhetoric.

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