Oil Spill Panel: Obama Incompetence Destroyed Public Trust

Only one thing truly mattered to Barack Obama as millions of gallons of oil spewed out of the ocean floor to contaminate the Gulf Coast: that Barack Obama not be blamed:

President Obama may have decried finger-pointing today, but he also did a fair amount of it himself. Not only at the three companies, but at previous administrations.

Here’s what he said today when he turned the finger at the federal government:

“For too long, for a decade or more, there has been a cozy relationship between the oil companies and the federal agency that permits them to drill. It seems as if permits were too often issued based on little more than assurances of safety from the oil companies. That cannot and will not happen anymore.””A decade or more” clearly encompasses the Bush Administration, and may include the Clinton years too. But Mr. Obama’s been president for nearly 16 months. Does he get at least a little piece of the blame?

Not a bit, he made clear. He portrayed his administration as valiantly fighting the good fight against the oil companies from day one […]

None of the following things that Barack Obama did were Barack Obama’s fault:

Barack Obama took more money from British Petroleum than any politician over a twenty year period.  In spite of the fact that he had only been in national politics for less than three years.  Barack Obama’s administration approved the project and granted the permit for the doomed BP drilling site.  Barack Obama’s administration helped quash environmental problems and issued an environmental waiver to BP at said doomed site only days before the disaster.  Barack Obama failed to take the disaster seriously and delayed serious action for weeks, fiddling with fundraisers, golf outings, and vacations while the Gulf went to hell.  The Obama administration has continued to delay and waste time pursuing the dotting of the i’s and the crossing of the t’s regarding mindless bureaucratic inanities.

It was also not Barack Obama’s fault that Barack Obama turned down virtually every international offer to help help him clean up his mess while he was clearly not up to the job.

It was not Barack Obama’s fault that Barack Obama seemed to have absolutely no clue whatsoever what to do – as testified by even his own fellow liberals.

Nor was it Barack Obama’s fault that Barack Obama’s deceit-based moratorium on drilling has cost the Gulf thousands of jobs in what can only be seen as a double-whammy-smackdown on a region that had already experienced disaster.

And so, clearly, it is not Barack Obama’s fault that the public lost trust in Barack Obama’s government due to Barack Obama’s incompetence:

Spill panel: Federal confusion lost public trust
By SETH BORENSTEIN and DINA CAPPIELLO, Associated Press Writers Seth Borenstein And Dina Cappiello, Associated Press Writers  – September 27, 2010

WASHINGTON – The Obama administration’s repeated low estimates of the huge BP oil spill undermined public confidence in the government’s entire cleanup effort, leaders of a White House-appointed commission declared at an investigatory hearing Monday.  One likened the mistakes to Custer’s disastrous decisions at Little Big Horn.

Federal officials botched the government’s response, a local official and government and university scientists contended as the commission focused on the questions of who was in charge and how much oil spewed out of the well into the Gulf of Mexico.

Eventually, U.S. officials said the spill was about 60 times bigger than originally estimated. Instead of 42,000 gallons a day, the volume of leaking oil was closer to 2.4 million gallons a day.

“It’s a lot like Custer,” said panel co-chairman Bob Graham, a former Florida senator and governor, referring to the battle that killed George Armstrong Custer and wiped out most of the Army’s 7th Calvary in 1876. “He underestimated the number of Indians on the other side of the hill and paid the ultimate price.”

And who was in charge? Billy Nungesser, president of Plaquemines Parish, one of the coastal areas most affected by the spill, referred to another famous leader, this one fictional.

“It became a joke,” he told the commission. “The Houma command was the Wizard of Oz, some guy behind the curtain.”

Mistakes in the information that was being given out sapped confidence in the government on the issue, Graham and co-chairman William Reilly said at a news conference. Reilly described “repeated wrong numbers” on the amount of oil that was spilling.

I know who was supposed to be in charge: Barack Obama.  But he’s a total incompetent failure, who is skilled only in reading aloud whatever a teleprompter screen prompts him to say, and demagoguing.  And that’s why a crisis became such a pathetic and costly joke on every American citizen.

Obama Wants To Know ‘Whose Ass To Kick.’ Tell Him To Start With His OWN

Obama falsely presented himself as a great unifier, a “new politician,” one who would transcendentally rise above petty bickering and usher us into a new Utopia.

And remember all that garbage about Obama pointing to his election as the moment when the rise of the oceans began to slow and the planet began to heal?

The only problem is that he was in reality never anything more than a petty demagogue.  He’s a community organizer, and all that community organizers know how to do is racially divide communities and boycott businesses that create jobs and produce wealth.

Listen to the audio of Obama’s contemptibly arrogant boasts while watching footage of pelicans desperately floundering to somehow stay alive in the billions of gallons of oil contaminating the coasts.

And as Americans rightly blame Obama’s federal government more and more for this disaster, that demagogue is coming out to bite.

From the AP:

VENICE, La/WASHINGTON (Reuters) – President Barack Obama said he wanted to know “whose ass to kick” over the Gulf of Mexico oil spill, adding to the pressure on energy giant BP Plc as it sought to capture more of the leak from its gushing well.

“I don’t sit around just talking to experts because this is a college seminar. We talk to these folks because they potentially have the best answer so I know whose ass to kick,” Obama said in an interview with NBC News’ “Today” to air on Tuesday.

They were the angriest words yet about the catastrophe from Obama, who has been criticized for his response to the worst oil spill in U.S. history. Obama reiterated that all those affected should be adequately compensated.

Why don’t you start by kicking your own ass, Obama?  And give it a good, hard kick right out of the office you are clearly not qualified to hold.

A Washington Post/ABC poll found that 69 percent of Americans believe the government had done a “not so good” or “poor” job handling the spill. Just over 1,000 people were surveyed in the poll, conducted between June 3 and 6.

Which is another way of saying, “Hey Obama, you suck!!!”

The American people think you should kick your own damn lying weaselly scrawny ass.

And here’s another little factoid via ABC:

A month and a half after the spill began, 69 percent in a new ABC News/Washington Post poll rate the federal response negatively. That compares with a 62 negative rating for the response to Katrina two weeks after the August 2005 hurricane.

Which is to say you are now officially a bigger failure over the Gulf disaster than George Bush was over Hurricane Katrina, Obama.  Please wear the title of “Worst President EVER” proudly.

You really want to know whose ass to kick, Obama?  I cite myself from a previous article, and that is hardly all the reasons to blame Obama:

Barack Obama took more money from British Petroleum than any politician over a twenty year period.  In spite of the fact that he had only been in national politics for less than three years.  Barack Obama’s administration approved the project and granted the permit for the doomed BP drilling site.  Barack Obama’s administration helped quash environmental problems and issued an environmental waiver to BP at said doomed site only days before the disaster.  Barack Obama failed to take the disaster seriously and delayed serious action for weeks, fiddling with fundraisers, golf outings, and vacations while the Gulf went to hell.  The Obama administration has continued to delay and waste time pursuing the dotting of the i’s and the crossing of the t’s regarding mindless bureaucratic inanities.

That’s hardly all the reasons to point out that Obama bears a massive amount of responsibility for this disaster, or that he has been a complete failure in responding to the disaster.  And even many liberals are realizing the scope of Obama’s failure.

Instead of idly speculating whose ass you should be kicking, why don’t you resign from office, so someone who knows what the hell he’s doing can instead actually lead us to an actual solution to this terrible crisis???

We will have our chance to kick Obama’s ass in November.

Update, June 9, 2010:

The Looking Spoon suggests that an Obama official help Obama decide whose ass should be kicked first by means of a mirror:

And Bill Kristol had a magnificent point to make about Obama calling meetings of experts so he could decide whose ass to kick:

The best thing about his statement is not really that I’m — excuse the vulgarity, “I want to kick some ass, I’m angry.”  If the president said that, you’d say, fine, he’s angry. But I love his formulation that the reason I listen to these experts is that they have the best answers so I know whose ass to kick.

He’s so professorial that he thinks you have to call a meeting of experts to decide whose ass to kick. Don’t most politicians, most executives just decide that at some point, I’m going to go get mad and they don’t have the meetings experts in the Roosevelt Room to decide who to get mad at.

It had not yet occurred to me that I had never needed a room full of bureaucrats to decide whose ass I should kick until Kristol pointed that common sense out to me.  I’m just glad I wasn’t drinking milk when I heard this.