Obama’s Fake-Believe On Oil Drilling

Good article appearing on RedState.  My only beef is the claim that Obama is full of “ethanol,” when we all ought to know Obama is actually full of methane (I’m guessing Horowitz was just being polite).

Obama’s Oil Drilling Subterfuge
We’ve been here before.
Posted by Daniel Horowitz (Profile)
Monday, May 16th at 7:48AM EDT

Many liberals in the media are expressing shock over Obama’s apparent willingness to increase oil production.  We all know that he is full of …, I mean ethanol, and they do too.

Those of you who were befuddled at the news that Obama will ‘expand drilling’ in Alaska are not missing anything.  Obama has pulled this political chicanery a number of times.  Whenever a specific proposal that he so adamantly opposes becomes too popular to ignore, he announces his support for it by promising to implement inconsequential reforms.  To that end, he declared during his Saturday radio address that he is “directing the Department of Interior to conduct annual lease sales in Alaska’s National Petroleum Reserve, while respecting sensitive areas, and to speed up the evaluation of oil and gas resources in the mid and south Atlantic”.

So we are to believe that the Beaufort and Chukchi Seas and ANWR, all of which are impounded from drilling leases by the administration, are more sensitive than Alaska’s National Petroleum Reserve?  Caribou, baby, Caribou in ANWR; drill, baby, drill in ANPR?  Think again.

Here is the report from The Hill:

President Obama announced Saturday the government would hold annual onshore lease sales in Alaska’s National Petroleum Reserve; extend the life of leases in the Gulf of Mexico and in some areas off the coast of Alaska for one year; speed up ongoing Interior Department testing in the mid- and south-Atlantic to gauge the level of resources; and establish an interagency task force to coordinate permitting for offshore drilling in Alaska.

The White House is making the policy shifts after taking intense criticism from Republicans in recent weeks over energy policy as gas prices have topped $4 per gallon in some parts of the country.Many of the proposals are incremental expansions of existing policies and had been set in motion prior to Saturday’s announcement. It’s also unclear by how much the plan will increase domestic oil production. (emphasis added)

Once again, Obama is attempting to diffuse disquiet over his anti-energy policies by embracing the opposition through inconsequential and empty promises.  He attempted this stratagem earlier this year when he announced wholesale regulatory reform in a Wall Street Journal op-ed.  Amidst growing pressure to roll back job killing regulations, Obama announced a momentous effort to “study” onerous regulations.  Needless to say, the regulations in the federal register have only grown since his vapid announcement.  In fact, he is attempting to regulate every facet of our economy; from the broadband providers to oil refineries, without congressional approval.  Nonetheless, he is still studying the problem.

Obama used the same ploy in his State of the Union Address by embracing popular policies, such as a corporate tax cuts and tort reform.  We haven’t heard about them since the address and probably never will.

His promise to reform land lease permits and to allow drilling in Alaska is another attempt at subterfuge for the purpose of tamping down the outrage toward his job-killing, anti-growth policies.  After all, didn’t the administration oppose all three GOP bills that would implement some of these very changes just last week?  House Natural Resources Committee Chairman Doc Hastings (R-WA) released the following statement on Obama’s radio address:

“In the last week, House Republicans passed three bipartisan bills that will create 1.2 million jobs, triple American offshore oil production and generate $840 million in revenue – real action to produce real American energy. It’s ironic that while the White House and Congressional Democrats strongly criticized these efforts, President Obama is now taking tiny baby steps in our direction. The President is finally admitting what Republicans have known all along – that increasing the supply of American energy will help lower prices and create jobs. One weekend address announcing minor policy tinkering, while positive, does not erase the Administration’s long job-destroying record of locking-up America’s energy resources.”

As Drudge observed yesterday, Obama made the exact same pledge over a year ago, immediately preceding his inexorable and unprecedented moratorium on drilling in the Gulf of Mexico and the Outer Continental Shelf (OCS).  Sadly, the New York Times was credulous enough to believe it and carried water for Obama by headlining a story at that time titled, “Obama to Open Offshore Areas to Oil Drilling for First Time.”  That didn’t exactly work out according to plan.

As such, don’t be fooled by this foxhole conversion.  His speech does not reflect a newfound obsequious to the will of the American people; he will never abdicate his radical ideology so easily.  Moreover, his political appointees at the Department of Energy and Department of Interior will wait for the inevitable lawsuits from environmental legal defense groups to scuttle the plans.  That is what the administration did when they blocked Shel Oil from drilling in the Arctic Ocean.  The environmentalists are already chomping at the bit.  And as is the case with every other proposal, he will encumber any meaningful drilling policies with endless environmental impact studies.  It’s akin to Obama’s promises of securing the border, even as his minions at the Department of Homeland Security instruct ICE agents not to apprehend non-criminal aliens.  Talk is cheap, Mr. President, and in your case, it is worthless.

Call your members of congress and request that they support H.R. 1777, which would implement comprehensive pro-energy reforms, such as opening ANWR for drilling, streamlining the permit and leasing process, and lawsuit reform (summary and commentary here).  Let’s unmask Obama’s fallacious attempt at being pro-energy and make him take a stand against real energy production legislation!

Very good historical presentation of  Barack Obama’s blatant dishonesty and lack of any kind of integrity.

If you actually want the domestic drilling that will reduce both short- and long-term oil prices, elect a real conservative for president.  One thing is certain: you will NEVER get any kind of relief from Barack Hussein Obama.

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.

‘Transparency’ In Action: Obama Blocks Media To Conceal Failures

Let’s see.  Hope?  No freaking way.  Change?  Yes, but it’s really, really BAD change.  Even die hard and hard-core liberals like Robert Reich and Paul Krugman are predicting that Obamanomics are leading us into a double-dip recession IF we’re lucky enough to avoid a depression. Transparency?

Ooh, boy.

Afghan violence is soaring.  Obama’s own handpicked general is saying that the president is overwhelmed and unprepared, and that his civilian leadership team is a bunch of incompetent clowns.  All the evidence indicates that Obama is massively failing in Iraq.

What should he do?

Well, he should do the same thing in Afghanistan that he’s going to do about all his calamitous failures in the Gulf of Mexico.

He’s going to make sure that the media doesn’t have a chance to report the truth about what a failure he is at everything he touches.

Obama is going to clamp down on senior military commanders’ access to the media.  Oh, that directive has NOTHING to do with the McChrystal fiasco, just as my writing this article on Obama banning the media has nothing whatsoever to do with the new media ban policy.

From the Wall Street Journal:

WASHINGTON – Defense Secretary Robert Gates on Friday issued a directive to all senior Pentagon military and civilian officials saying their dealing with the media “has grown lax” in recent months and ordering them to get approval for all engagements with the press through his office.

The directive, a two-page memo signed by Mr. Gates, comes just days after Gen. Stanley McChrystal was fired as commander in Afghanistan for intemperate remarks made to Rolling Stone magazine. The existence of the directive was reported by the New York Times and a copy was obtained by The Wall Street Journal.

Despite the timing, Geoff Morrell, the Pentagon press secretary, said it had been in the works for months before Gen. McChrystal’s firing. “This memo was written well before that,” Mr. Morrell said. “He thinks the department has been much too cavalier with its handling of the press.”

Now, you’d THINK they’d just admit the obvious and say, “That McChrystal thing was a real disaster, and we need to try to prevent something that disgraceful from happening again.”  But this is the most pathologically dishonest administration in history.  It’s like they have a perfect record on lying, and they’re not going to break it by telling the truth now.

This just goes back to Rahm Emanuel’s “Never let a crisis go to waste” mindset.

This is an administration that is so hostile to actual transparency that it has actually closed workshops on government openness to the public and blocked the press from attending transparency and accountability board meetings.

On front after front, this is the most opaque administration ever.  They block themselves off from media accountability even as they pat themselves on the back for their transparency.

This is the kind of administration that claims that it is advancing the will of the people when they are cynically defying and misrepresenting the will of the people.

It’s a constant pattern.  Just today, the Government Accountability Office (GAO) reported that Obama has utterly failed at transparency regarding the massive porkulus boondoggle.  What a shock.

In Afghanistan, Obama prevents the military from open access to the press, which means that the military can’t tell us how shockingly incompetent Obama is as commander-in-chief.

So it shouldn’t be a surprise that Obama would deal with his failure in the
Gulf of Mexico the same way he’s handled everything else.  He has been so pathetically incompetent that there’s a pretty damn good argument that he is stopping the cleanup efforts on purpose.

White House Enacts Rules Inhibiting Media From Covering Oil Spill
By Noel Sheppard
Created 07/03/2010 – 11:28

The White House Thursday enacted stronger rules to prevent the media from showing what’s happening with the oil spill in the Gulf Coast.

CNN’s Anderson Cooper reported that evening, “The Coast Guard today announced new rules keeping photographers and reporters and anyone else from coming within 65 feet of any response vessel or booms out on the water or on beaches — 65 feet.”

He elaborated, “Now, in order to get closer, you have to get direct permission from the Coast Guard captain of the Port of New Orleans. You have to call up the guy. What this means is that oil-soaked birds on islands surrounded by boom, you can’t get close enough to take that picture.”

You’ve got CNN and Anderson Cooper – both of whom lean reliably to the left – having this to say about Obama’s “transparency”:

“This time, however, we’re not talking about BP. We’re talking about the government, a new a rule announced today backed by the force of law and the threat of fines and felony charges, a rule that will prevent reporters and photographers and anyone else from getting anywhere close to booms and oil-soaked wildlife and just about any place we need to be.”

[…]

We’re not the enemy here. Those of us down here trying to accurately show what’s happening, we are not the enemy. I have not heard about any journalist who has disrupted relief efforts. No journalist wants to be seen as having slowed down the cleanup or made things worse. If a Coast Guard official asked me to move, I would move.

But to create a blanket rule that everyone has to stay 65 feet away boom and boats, that doesn’t sound like transparency. Frankly, it’s a lot like in Katrina when they tried to make it impossible to see recovery efforts of people who died in their homes.

If we can’t show what is happening, warts and all, no one will see what’s happening. And that makes it very easy to hide failure and hide incompetence and makes it very hard to highlight the hard work of cleanup crews and the Coast Guard. We are not the enemy here.

We found out today two public broadcasting journalists reporting on health issues say they have been blocked again and again from visiting a federal mobile medical unit in Venice, a trailer where cleanup workers are being treated. It’s known locally as the BP compound. And these two reporters say everyone they have talked to, from BP to the Coast Guard, to Health and Human Services in Washington has been giving them the runaround.

We’re not talking about a CIA station here. We’re talking about a medical trailer that falls under the authority of, guess who, Thad Allen, the same Thad Allen who promised transparency all those weeks ago.

We are not the enemy here.

Everybody who cares about reality, and everybody who cares about truth, is Obama’s enemy, Anderson.

Obama has a lot to hide.  He’s got a lot to be ashamed of.  He’s failing on so many levels at the same time that no one can even keep track of them all.  The Gulf spill – already the worst in history – could be such a disaster that we might literally be in a “You can’t handle the truth!” moment.  Obama is now the worst president in American history even according to the standards the Democrats used against Bush in 2004.  And all he can do on the economy is keep blaming Bush and keep telling the same failed lie he’s been telling since the American people were stupid enough to hand him the keys to the White House.

All I can do about the Fascist-in-Chief is say those four words: I told you so.

Failure-in-Chief Obama Plunges To All-Time Low According To NBC/WSJ Poll

Maybe Americans don’t like hopey changey so much after all.

Have you ever had somebody say you can hope into one hand, and defecate into the other hand, and then see which hand gets full first?  Well, we took the “hopey-crappy challenge,” and now we’ve got a giant load of crap sitting in our White House, taking the place of an actual president who can truly lead and effectively govern, ought to be.

New poll shows Obama approval at all-time low
Thu Jun 24, 2:28 pm ET

The White House has been fond of citing turning points lately, most recently when describing the administration’s handling of the Gulf of Mexico oil spill. Now President Obama faces a turning point of his own — and not for the better.

A new NBC/Wall Street Journal poll finds Obama’s approval rating to be the lowest it’s been since he took office 18 months ago. According to the poll, only 45 percent approve of the job Obama is doing in the White House, compared with 48 percent who disapprove. And the numbers only get worse from there: Sixty-two percent of respondents believe the country is on the wrong track — the highest number recorded since just before Election Day in 2008 — and just one-third believe things are going to get better, a 7-point drop since a month ago and the lowest such number in the Obama presidency.

The fallout from the Gulf of Mexico oil spill appears to be the biggest drag on Obama’s numbers. Fifty percent disapprove of his handling of the crisis — including one in four Democrats.  But generally, the poll finds increasing doubts about Obama as a leader. Just 49 percent of those polled give Obama positive ratings when asked if he has “strong leadership qualities” — that’s a decline of 8 points since January and nearly 20 points from when he first took office. Less than half rate him positively when asked if he’s “honest and straightforward.” In January ’09, 63 percent gave him positive marks for “being firm and decisive in decision-making.” That number is now at 44 percent. Asked about his “ability to handle a crisis,” only 40 percent rate him positively, an 11-point drop since January. You can read the full poll results here.

Obama’s biggest problem: He’s lost the middle — the so-called independent and moderate voters who are generally given the most credit for his win back in 2008. According to the poll, 52 percent of self-described independent voters disapprove of the job Obama is doing. He’s even losing parts of his base. The poll finds Obama with 17 percent disapproval among Democrats — the highest number of his presidency.

None of this is good news for Democrats up for re-election this fall. Beleaguered Democrats had been counting on Obama’s coattails to help them, as polls have also showed a historic trend away from the Democratic Party. According to this new poll, the GOP has a 2-point edge over Democrats in the generic congressional ballot — but among voters who describe themselves as most interested in the 2010 midterms, the GOP jumps to a 21-point lead over Democrats.

— Holly Bailey is a senior politics writer for Yahoo! News.

Did you catch that red emboldened part about the Republicans currently having a 21-point lead over Democrats when you count the people who are actually going to vote?

Democrats had a 60 vote supermajority in the United States Senate.  They could pass ANYTHING.  And they used their power to pass shockingly terrible legislation that will haunt Americans for decades to come.  The American people corrected that disastrous mistake the first chance they had, but Democrats STILL have an overwhelming majority of 59 votes.  And they have a gigantic majority in the House of Representatives.  And yet they are such disastrous failures, and are in such total and complete disarray, that they can’t even pass a budget.  Which allows Democrats to continue their insane, destructive spending divorced from any checks or balances until the people finally get to hold them accountable in November.

Democrats have blamed Bush every step of the way.  They have acted like a child who comes to school every single day for a year and a half and tells the teacher that the dog ate his homework.

Well, eventually such bratty, irresponsible kids flunk out.

Obama Worst President In History, According To 2004 Democrat Campaign Rhetoric

This is just too good.  Barack Hussein is far and away the very worst president in American history.  And that according to the very same standards that Democrats attacked George Bush with in 2004.

Democrats of 2004 Brand Obama Worst President
By Kevin Hassett – Jun 20, 2010

As we approach another general election, it will be interesting to see how the economic performance of Democrats is judged. If voters borrow the preferred method of John Kerry and other Democrats from 2004, Barack Obama will be revealed to be among the worst presidents in history.

During the 2004 election, Democrats constantly reminded voters that George W. Bush was the first president in decades to oversee a net loss of jobs.

The drumbeat was incessant. “This administration is the first since Herbert Hoover’s to actually lose jobs on its watch — 1.8 million jobs,” Kerry said at a campaign stop. His campaign chairman, Jeanne Shaheen, said Bush deserved “the first-ever ‘Herbert Hoover Award’ for having the worst jobs record since the Great Depression.”

The Hoover analogy was a stretch, as some recognized even back then. The watchdog election site factcheck.org wrote, “Comparing the Bush economy to Hoover’s Great Depression is just silly, and implying that tax cuts are not contributing to job growth deserves an ‘F’ in freshman economics.”

As an adviser to the Bush re-election campaign, I regularly rebutted the Hoover charge when I appeared on television to debate Kerry supporters in 2004. Here’s what I said then, and still say now: While some presidents arrive in Washington during boom times, others come during busts, and those often are the ones elected precisely because voters hope that they will change economic policies.

Jobless Recovery

Bush arrived just as the last recession was beginning — a bit of timing that Obama can relate to. Though that recession was brief, the subsequent jobless recovery did little to strengthen Bush’s record as he entered his reelection year.

Obama, of course, is just 17 months into his presidency, and more than two years from facing the voters personally. But with a big midterm congressional election upcoming, let’s see how Obama would fare if Kerry-like tactics were used on him.

The answer: not well. Whether the measurement is job creation, unemployment or growth of gross domestic product, the economy has been worse under Obama than it was under Bush.

First, job creation. According to data from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, the U.S. shed 2.3 million jobs since February 2009, Obama’s first full month in office. Going back to World War II, that is by far the worst record for any president in his first 17 months, outpacing the job destruction experienced in the early Bush years by more than 800,000 jobs.

Campaign Fodder

For Obama, there is an even worse way to play the data, which might just become fodder for a political ad: From November 2008, the month he was elected, until now, the economy has shed an astonishing 4.4 million jobs. That’s worse than Hoover.

Sure, you can blame the first few months of that period on lame-duck President Bush. But perhaps companies accelerated their shedding of jobs because they were bracing for higher tax rates, increased union power and costly environmental taxes under Obama.

Other measurements are only slightly kinder to Obama. The two-percentage-point increase in unemployment rate during his presidency, to 9.7 percent from 7.7 percent, is the third-worst since World War II. Dwight Eisenhower and Gerald Ford saw bigger increases.

GDP growth under Obama, an abysmal 3 percentage points so far, is the fourth-worst in the postwar period. Eisenhower, Ford and Ronald Reagan all began their terms with worse GDP growth.

But hey, it was Kerry and the Democrats who made job creation the be-all and end-all measurement of a presidency, and by that standard, Obama is dredging a new low. It’s probably a good bet that Democrats who became so enamored of Hoover’s name in 2004 won’t be mentioning it much this year.

Republicans should be willing to drop it too — so long as some economic adviser to Kerry-Edwards ‘04 admits the campaign was wrong to bring up Herbert Hoover in the first place.

(Kevin Hassett, director of economic-policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute, is a Bloomberg News columnist. He was an adviser to Republican Senator John McCain in the 2008 presidential election. The opinions expressed are his own.)

So if you want to see the case that Barack Obama is the worst president in history, don’t bother reading what conservatives say; just listen to Democrats own rhetoric from just a few years ago.

This article’s findings as to just what a disaster Obama has been even measuring by the Democrats’ own standards does not include the recent information that Obama’s mortgage modification program has totally failed in every way imaginable, and that sales of new homes has fallen to the lowest level ever recorded? It was the mortgage industry that created the 2008 collapse – and Obama has done nothing but make a black hole of crisis even worse.

I can’t even imagine how shrilly the Democrats would have decried those facts had they occurred during the Bush years.

And, to go on, you want to talk about a president’s ability to handle a national disaster such as the Gulf of Mexico oil spill, day 64?  No matter how bad you want to say Bush was regarding Hurricane Katrina, Bush is now widely recognized to have done a far superior job.  How about war fighting?  Bush won in Iraq; Obama is floundering enormously in Afghanistan.

Basically, by whatever metric you want to use, Obama is the biggest disgrace to ever occupy the White House.

If this doesn’t prove that Democrats are a) pathological demagogues and b) completely unfit to govern, what possibly could?

Obama Massively Failing In Afghanistan

This is nothing more than an effort to hold Obama accountable to the very same standards he used to demonize George Bush in Iraq:

Afghanistan violence is soaring, U.N. says
Afghanistan is increasingly dangerous for troops and civilians alike, a report says, citing an ‘alarming’ 94% increase in bomb attacks in the first four months of 2010, compared with last year.

By Laura King, Los Angeles Times
June 20, 2010
Reporting from Kabul, Afghanistan

Afghanistan has become a far more dangerous place for Western troops and Afghan civilians alike, with an increase in suicide attacks, roadside bombings and political assassinations in the first four months of 2010, the United Nations said in a report released Saturday.

The gloomy assessment comes on the heels of congressional testimony last week by senior U.S. military officials who acknowledged that efforts to stabilize Afghanistan’s volatile south are proving more complex and time-consuming than anticipated.

With the U.S. troop numbers in the country approaching the 100,000 mark, the Western military toll has been rising sharply as the summer “fighting season” unfolds. More than 1,000 U.S. service members have died in the nearly 9-year-old conflict.

“There has been a great deal of ‘kinetic activity'” as Western and Afghan forces confront insurgents in the south, German army Brig. Gen. Josef Blotz, a spokesman for the North Atlantic Treaty Organization’s International Security Assistance Force, told reporters Saturday in Kabul, the capital. That is the term the military uses to describe battlefield clashes.

The U.N. report, submitted by Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon to the Security Council and released by the world body’s mission in Afghanistan, notes a near-doubling in the number of attacks involving roadside bombs.

It describes an “alarming” 94% increase in bomb attacks from the same January-April period a year earlier. Roadside bombs planted by the Taliban and other insurgents are generally aimed at foreign troops, but because they are planted on routes used by everyone, they kill and maim many civilians as well.

The report also cites an average of three suicide bombings a week across Afghanistan, a growing number of them attacks involving more than one assailant, sometimes in combination with use of rockets, mortars and gunfire.

Targeted killings of Afghan officials had increased by 45%, the report says, with most taking place in the south, where the insurgency is strongest. The killings tend to target locally influential figures, such as tribal elders and other dignitaries who might be able to rally villagers and townspeople to resist the Taliban.

In one recent example, the district governor in Arghandab, a strategic gateway to the city of Kandahar, was killed in an insurgent bombing. NATO had touted the district as an area in which headway was being made in winning over the populace and improving security

Western officials have been describing their own campaign in the south as a combined political and military effort, and systematic assassinations appear aimed at sapping the will of local officials and others seen as cooperating with foreign forces or the Afghan government.

The U.N. report takes a more hopeful tone about some recent political developments, including nascent efforts by the government of President Hamid Karzai to woo Taliban foot soldiers away from the fight.

It notes, though, that “in general, the Taliban have reacted negatively to peace and reconciliation.”

Let’s reflect on this disastrous report, in light of Obama’s demonization and demagoguery of George Bush’s successful attempt to prevail in Iraq.

Obama attacked and undermined Bush’s incredibly successful troop surge:

“I am not persuaded that 20,000 additional troops in Iraq is going to solve the sectarian violence there,” he told MSNBC. “In fact, I think it will do the reverse.”

And then recently tried to take credit for it’s magnificent success via his Vice President:

On Larry King Live last night, Vice President Joe Biden said Iraq “could be one of the great achievements of this administration. You’re going to see 90,000 American troops come marching home by the end of the summer. You’re going to see a stable government in Iraq that is actually moving toward a representative government.”

Obama is the consummate demagogue who demonized Bush in Afghanistan by claiming:

“We’ve got to get the job done there and that requires us to have enough troops so that we’re not just air-raiding villages and killing civilians, which is causing enormous pressure over there.”

Condemn him as a failure and a disgrace according to his own demagogic standard.  He demonized Bush, when Bush succeeded.  How much more should we demonize Obama, as he’s utterly failing???

But this is worse than merely a failure of leadership.  Far worse.

Charles Krauthammer pointed out the sheer cynical depravity of Barack Obama and the Democrat Party as regards Iraq and Afghanistan by pointing to what the Democrats themselves said:

Bob Shrum, who was a high political operative who worked on the Kerry campaign in ’04, wrote a very interesting article in December of last year in which he talked about that campaign, and he said, at the time, the Democrats raised the issue of Afghanistan — and they made it into “the right war” and “the good war” as a way to attack Bush on Iraq.  In retrospect, he writes, that it was, perhaps, he said, misleading. Certainly it was not very wise.

What he really meant to say — or at least I would interpret it — it was utterly cynical. In other words, he’s confessing, in a way, that the Democrats never really supported the Afghan war. It was simply a club with which to bash the [Bush] administration on the Iraq war and pretend that Democrats aren’t anti-war in general, just against the wrong war.

Well, now they are in power, and they are trapped in a box as a result of that, pretending [when] in opposition that Afghanistan is the good war, the war you have to win, the central war in the war on terror. And obviously [they are] now not terribly interested in it, but stuck.

And that’s why Obama has this dilemma. He said explicitly on ABC a few weeks ago that he wouldn’t even use the word “victory” in conjunction with Afghanistan.

And Democrats in Congress have said: If you don’t win this in one year, we’re out of here. He can’t win the war in a year. Everybody knows that, which means he [Obama] has no way out.

Afghanistan was just a way to demagogue Bush in Iraq by describing Afghanistan – where Obama is failing so badly – as “the good war” and Iraq – where Bush won so triumphantly – as “the bad war.”  It was beyond cynical; it was flat-out treasonous.

George Bush selected Iraq as his central front for sound strategic reason.  Iraq had a despotic tyrant who supported terrorism.  Saddam Hussein needed to be removed to mount any kind of successful peace effort in the Middle East.  Iraq is located in the heart of the Arab/Islamic world.  It has an educated population relative to the rest of the region.  It also offered precisely the type of terrain that would allow American forces to implement their massive military superiority in a way that mountainous, cave-ridden Afghanistan would not.

Bush was determined to fight a war where he could win.  Obama foolishly trapped us in a war that would bleed us.  Why?  For no other reason than pure political demagoguery.  And he needs to be held accountable.

And where are we now under Obama’s failed leadership???

An article entitled, “Pentagon worried about Obama’s commitment to Afghanistan” ended with this assessment from a senior Pentagon official:

“I think they (the Obama administration) thought this would be more popular and easier.  We are not getting a Bush-like commitment to this war.”

See my piece from last year predicting this failure.  Read that article and explain to me where I was wrong, liberals.  I dare you.

American casualties under Obama in 2009 more than doubled compared to the total in 2008 when Bush was commander-in-chief.  And they are set to more than double this year compared to 2009.

From iCasualties, accessed June 21, 2010:

We’re paying attention to Obama’s massive, massive failure of leadership in the Gulf Coast.  That’s all well and good.  But don’t forget Obama’s massive failure of leadership in Afghanistan.

And just as we should rightly condemn Barack Obama for his demonization and demagoguery of Bush in Katrina, we should likewise condemn him for his demonization and demagoguery of Bush in Afghanistan.  We should hold Barack Hussein accountable to his own hypocritical, two-faced standards, and demand his resignation as a failure and a fraud.

Update, June 22: Heck, I wrote this yesterday, and hadn’t even published it yet when I discovered I needed to update.  Because now we now that Stanley McChrystal, commanding general in Afghanistan, thinks that Obama – and virtually every single man Obama has appointed in Afghanistan – are a bunch of clueless clowns.

McChrystal sided with his troops against his Failure-in-Chief once before.  I think he did it again to let his troops know that he understands the real problem facing them.

MSNBC has some of the highlights:

• McChrystal has seized control of the war “by never taking his eye off the real enemy: The wimps in the White House.”
• One aide called White House National Security Adviser Jim Jones, a retired four star general, a “clown” who was “stuck in 1985.”
• Obama agreed to dispatch an additional 30,000 U.S. troops to Afghanistan only after months of study that many in the military found frustrating. And the White House’s troop commitment was coupled with a pledge to begin bringing them home in July 2011, in what counterinsurgency strategists advising McChrystal regarded as an arbitrary deadline.
• The article portrayed McChrystal’s team as disapproving of the Obama administration, with the exception of Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, who backed McCrystal’s request for additional troops in Afghanistan.
• It quotes a member of McChrystal’s team making jokes about Biden, who was seen as critical of the general’s efforts to escalate the conflict and who had favored a more limited counter-terrorism approach. “Biden?” the aide was quoted as saying. “Did you say: Bite me?” Biden initially opposed McChrystal’s proposal for additional forces last year. He favored a narrower focus on hunting terrorists.

This, too, is another example of liberal hypocrisy.  What happened when Bush was depicted as not listening to his generals?  From the Washington Post, after Bush decided to pursue the (in hindsight) magnificently successful surge strategy:

This impulse may well expose Bush to more criticism from Democrats on Capitol Hill, who have sharply condemned him for not listening to Shinseki’s counsel in the beginning.

What’s it like to have your own fingers of demonization now pointing back at you?

Like I said, Obama is massively failing in Afghanistan.  Just like he’s massively failing everywhere else.

Update, June 26, 2010: Oh, by the way, get ready for what might be Obama’s “Abu Ghraib moment,” as videos of a mass slaughter of Afghani civilians makes its way to the public.

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.

.

Obama’s Katrina in Gulf Just Got Twice As Awful

What is it, day 54 of the fool-in-chief’s disastrous inability to do anything about that damn hole he can’t plug?

Well, the damn hold problem is officially bigger than ever.

June 10, 2010
Government doubles previous oil flow estimate for BP well
By Mark Seibel and Renee Schoof | McClatchy Newspapers

WASHINGTON — The Obama administration on Thursday doubled its minimum estimate of how much crude oil was gushing from the Deepwater Horizon oil well, saying a panel of scientists had concluded that 20,000 to 50,000 barrels, or as much as 2.1 million gallons, were pouring into the Gulf of Mexico every day before BP sheared the well’s riser pipe on June 3.

That action, which BP engineers undertook to fit a “top hat” containment dome over the well, almost certainly increased the flow, and Dr. Marcia McNutt, the head of the U.S. Geological Survey, said an estimate of the flow since June 3 would be available in a few days.

“Our scientific analysis is still a work in progress,” McNutt said.

The announcement that tens of thousands more barrels of oil than previously estimated have been spewing into the Gulf for weeks added to a growing sense that neither the federal government nor BP correctly assessed the size of the unfolding disaster or marshaled enough resources to meet it.

McClatchy gives us a picture of the constantly changing estimate:

The Los Angeles Times offers more on the sheer scope of the disaster Obama is doing such a terrible job presiding over:

The new figures could mean 42 million to 84 million gallons of oil have leaked into the Gulf of Mexico since the Deepwater Horizon rig exploded on the night of April 20 — with the lowest estimate nearly four times the size of the 1989 Exxon Valdez spill.

The flow estimates were released by Marcia McNutt, director of the U.S. Geological Survey, and do not count any increases that may have occurred since the cutting of the well’s riser pipe, a step that was expected to boost the flow.

And was it the heroic Obama administration that determined that the official estimates were wrong yet again?

No.  It was a bunch of scientists who had been arguing that the official estimates – from both BP and the federal government – were complete bullpucky:

The official government estimate of the flow rate is 12,000 to 19,000 barrels a day, which means the new device should be capturing the bulk of the oil. But some scientists have said those flow numbers could represent just the lower range and that the rate could be multiple times higher.

Worst-case scenario?
Leifer said based on the data he’s seen so far, the rate of flow from the broken well has increased since the initial April 20 explosion at the Deepwater Horizon rig, which killed 11 workers. He believes BP’s decision last week to sever the well’s damaged riser pipe in order to install the containment cap has increased the flow by far more than the 20 percent BP and government officials had predicted.

In fact, Leifer says, the well may be spewing what BP had called before the spill its worst-case scenario — as much as 100,000 barrels a day from a freely flowing pipe.He said he’s seen no evidence from BP to date that would be inconsistent from that dire scenario.

Judging by live undersea videos, “it looks like a freely flowing pipe,” Leifer said. “From what it looks like right now it suggests to me they’re capturing a negligible fraction.”

It’s unclear how much oil is still escaping because scientists don’t have access to enough data and the video feeds show a “disorganized cloud” of oil shooting out of open vents in the containment cap and between the riser and the cap, Wereley said.

Obama assured us prior to the top hat attempt which not only failed but made the crisis much, much worse that he was in charge, and that BP was answering to him.

Which means that it’s OBAMA’S FAULT that BP even attempted the top hat procedure in the first place.  Everyone knew there was a risk that it could make the problem much worse by at least 20%.  Obama gambled big and failed huge.

And it is readily apparent that Obama has literally assisted BP in a continual giant cover-up as to the actual extent of the damage, either by omission or comission:

From the New York Times:

Tensions between the Obama administration and the scientific community over the gulf oil spill are escalating, with prominent oceanographers accusing the government of failing to conduct an adequate scientific analysis of the damage and of allowing BP to obscure the spill’s true scope. […]

And the scientists say the administration has been too reluctant to demand an accurate analysis of how many gallons of oil are flowing into the sea from the gushing oil well. […]

Oceanographers have also criticized the Obama administration over its reluctance to force BP, the oil company responsible for the spill, to permit an accurate calculation of the flow rate from the undersea well. The company has refused to permit scientists to send equipment to the ocean floor that would establish the rate with high accuracy.

Ian MacDonald of Florida State University, an oceanographer who was among the first to question the official estimate of 210,000 gallons a day, said he had come to the conclusion that the oil company was bent on obstructing any accurate calculation. “They want to hide the body,” he said.

You want chilling?

Contacts in Louisiana have given me numerous, unconfirmed reports of cameras and cell phones being confiscated, scientists with monitoring equipment being turned away, and local reporters blocked from access to public lands impacted by the oil spill. But today CBS News got it on video, along with a bone-chilling statement by a Coast Guard official: “These are BP’s rules. These are not our rules.”

Fifty days into the disaster, Barack Obama had still never bothered to make any contact with the CEO of British Petroleum to lay out the way things will happen, to find out what is going on, or to hold BP accountable in any way for anything.  Or, I don’t know, to politely ask BP to please allow some actual measurements of the flow rate so the nation can know the extent of the disaster they are going to have to deal with.

And now it is becoming increasingly obvious that BP – not Barack – has been ruling the roost all along.

Obama is responsible?  He doesn’t even have a clue what is going on.

Well, now, after 54 days – and weeks’ worth of inexcusable delay and weeks’ worth of criticism – Obama is finally “summoning” the BP CEO to mitigate the damage being done to his political hide.  But it’s rather obvious that Obama isn’t meeting the BP chief to do the right thing, but rather to appear to do the right thing to avoid further legitimate criticism over why he’s taken so damn long to do the right thing.

Obama should have at least been on the phone with the BP head within the first three days of this disaster.  Instead, he’s ignored his responsibilities and allowed BP to repeatedly lie, obfuscate, conceal, and even fabricate and done nothing about any of it.

What we have here is a complete failure of leadership.  And the result of that failure has just officially become twice as awful as it had been.

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.

Yet Another Liberal Points Out That Obama Is An Abject Failure

You have to appreciate the irony at the start of this article.  Democrats have mocked Sarah Palin’s “Drill, baby, drill.”  But is their increasingly loud wail to Obama – “Do something, baby, do something” – somehow supposed to be better?

Where was plan A?
By KIRSTEN POWERS
Last Updated: 9:58 AM, May 27, 2010

Do something, baby, do something: That’s the cry from Obama supporters and opponents alike as the oil keeps gushing into the Gulf of Mexico.

The political firestorm kept growing yesterday, with supporter James Carville ranting that the administration has been “lackadaisical” and “naive” in its response to the disaster. He urged it to rapidly “move to Plan B.”

But that suggests there was ever a Plan A.

Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal is so frustrated with the lack of response to his plan to stop the slick with sand barriers that yesterday he called on the White House and BP to either “stop the oil spill or get out of the way.”

“Plug the damn hole,” President Obama reportedly barked at staffers in frustration after the explosion. That’s right up there with “Heckuva job, Brownie” in terms of clueless statements uttered by presidents in the midst of nationally televised disasters.

Meanwhile, White House regret over Obama’s politically expedient embrace of the “Drill, baby, drill” trope is growing faster than the vast oil slick.

Back on March 31, Obama announced — to the horror of many of his supporters — that he was expanding offshore drilling along the coastlines of the south and mid-Atlantic and in the Gulf of Mexico. Worse, he painted a (too) rosy scenario of offshore drilling being eminently safe.

True, it is rare that a full-blown environmental catastrophe results from an offshore oil well. But it can happen — and a Democratic president who’s embracing drilling ought to know the risks, and be prepared for the worst. But rather than planning for a spill, Obama parroted McCain-Palin talking points about how safe offshore drilling is.

Turns out the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration back in 1994 drafted plans for responding to a major Gulf oil spill, a response called “In-Situ Burn.”

Ron Gourget, a former federal oil-spill-response coordinator and one author of the draft, told the Times of London: “The whole reason the plan was created was so that we could pull the trigger right away.” The idea was to use barriers called “fire booms” to collect and contain the spill at sea — then burn it off. He believes this could have captured 95 percent of the oil from this spill.

But at the time of the Deepwater Horizon explosion, the federal government didn’t have a single fire boom on hand. Nor is there any evidence that the government required BP to have any clear plan to deal with a massive spill. How is this OK?

The administration’s chief response so far was to send out Interior Secretary Ken Salazar to do his best impersonation of a totalitarian thug, proclaiming that the government would “have its boot on the throat of BP.”

(Fun fact: While in the Senate, Salazar backed an increase in oil and gas leases in the Gulf Coast region by promoting and voting for the Gulf of Mexico Energy Security Act of 2006.)

Since the “blame BP” strategy isn’t working, Obama will today announce tougher safety requirements and more rigorous inspections for offshore drilling operations. Sounds nice — except the problem isn’t a lack of safety requirements, it’s that the experts at the US Minerals Management Service ignored the existing requirements.

In fact, it was under Salazar’s reign that the MMS approved BP’s drilling without getting the permits required by law for drilling that might harm endangered species. The agency routinely overruled warnings regarding the safety and environmental impact of drilling proposals in the Gulf.

None of this was a secret.

It also shouldn’t be a secret that no matter how many inspections and safety requirements you have, you can’t ever completely prevent disasters like this one. If you’re going to permit offshore drilling, be prepared to respond to a spill.

If he promised us anything, Obama promised us competence. Instead, we’ve gotten the Keystone Cops.

Ah, competence.  One day after Obama is gone, we might actually have some of that in the White House.

Obama is bringing his incompetence everywhere he goes, rather like the travelling salesman with the unfortunate body odor that exudes out of every pour brings stink with him everywhere he goes.

What was it about being a community organizer that prepared him to actually lead anything constructive?

It’s not right to say that Obama has been doing everything the federal government could do; no, he ignored the very first thing that the federal government already had as policy to do in the event of a disaster like this – and has done absolutely nothing else in its place.  Oil that could have been contained and burned off is instead murdering all of the pelicans on the coast.  And, instead of helping Louisiana do everything it could to keep that oil off its coasts and marshes, Obama’s federal government has massively screwed up on that side of the coin, too.  Governor Jindal demanded 24 temporary sand berms to act as a barrier between the coast and the oil; first the federal government said it had to dot every i and cross every t with endless environmental studies before it would authorize any such construction; then the government said it would only permit six berms, and would only actually pay for just one berm.  And now the oil is all over the place and its too damn late for much of anything but to scrub oil from the few pelicans that might survive.

Instead, what Zero did was ZERO.  Instead of actually working to resolve he problem, Obama has handled this like a campaign issue.  He handed all the responsibility over to British Petroleum while simultaneously saying he was responsible.  It has all been about words rather than action.

Bobby Jindal has called upon Obama to “either “stop the oil spill or get out of the way.” And of course Obama won’t do either.  His government is worse than useless, because it is getting in the way of actual efforts by Louisiana to DO SOMETHING.

So here’s what we’re facing now under the failed regime of our Turd-in-Chief:

“In Revelations, it says the water will turn to blood. That’s what it looks like out here — like the Gulf is bleeding,” said P.J. Hahn, director of coastal zone management for Plaquemines Parish as he kneeled down to take a picture of an oil-coated feather. “This is going to choke the life out of everything.” […]

Eugene, 54, who has worked for decades in a shipyard, said he was growing tired of the government’s response.

“He ain’t much of a leader,” he said of Obama. “The beach you can clean up. The marsh you can’t. Where’s the leadership. I want to hear what’s being done. We’re going to lose everything.” […]

Newly disclosed internal Coast Guard documents from the day after the explosion aboard the Deepwater Horizon rig indicated that U.S. officials were warning of a leak of 336,000 gallons per day of crude from the well in the event of a complete blowout.

The volume turned out to be much closer to that figure than the 42,000 gallons per day that BP first estimated. Weeks later it was revised to 210,000 gallons. Now, an estimated 500,000 to 1 million gallons of crude is believed to be leaking daily.

“He ain’t much of a leader.”  You got that right.  I was screaming that from the rooftops two years and change ago.

Do we have good information?  No, everything keeps turning out to be wrong – and always much for the worse.  Is anything getting done?  No.  Just one failed plan after another.  Having never bothered to implement the plan we’ve had since 1994 for a disaster like this.

Now we’re being told that the latest “fix” is capturing about 42,000 gallons of oil a day.  Which might sound impressive until you realize that it’s leaking a MILLION gallons a day.

And we’re looking at the very real possibility that we’re going to continue to see a massive disaster get more massive every single day until Christmas.

The Gulf of Mexico oil disaster is rather like the Obama administration itself: there’s just no end to this disaster, and all we have instead of solutions is a constant stream of misinformation and excuses.