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.

From Shock And Awe To Shock And Flaw

From an interview with former Secretary of the Navy John Lehman in the National Review:

Lehman: Clueless Obama [Robert Costa]

After watching President Obama’s remarks on national security this afternoon, John Lehman, the secretary of the Navy in the Reagan administration and a member of the 9/11 Commission, tells National Review Online that, “frankly, I’m pissed off.”

“President Obama just doesn’t get it,” says Lehman. “I don’t think he has a clue. It’s all pure spin. He’s ignoring key issues and taking respectable professionals like John Brennan and turning them into hacks and shills. It’s beyond contempt.”

“The president has ignored the 9/11 Commission’s report,” says Lehman. “This whole idea that we can fix things by jumping higher and faster is ridiculous. The fact is that the system worked just like we said it would work if the president failed to give the Director of National Intelligence the tools he needs: it’s bloated, bureaucratic, layered, and stultified.”

“President Obama continues to totally ignore one of the important thrusts of our 9/11 recommendations, which is that you have to approach counterterrorism as a multiagency intelligence issue, and not as a law-enforcement issue. He’s made a lot of commission’s members angry for dismissing our report and ignoring key recommendations.” Obama, he adds, has taken a “lawyer-like, politically-correct approach” to national security issues like terrorist watchlists and no-fly lists. “You got to blame the president for enforcing the politically-correct and legalistic policies that led to these failures.”

I myself didn’t bother to watch the latest Obama press conference.  I have long-since come to the realization that Obama may not like waterboarding very much, but he doesn’t mind torturing truth.  But I did look over a couple of articles reporting on it.  I didn’t see anything new, other than that Obama is saying his old garbage in a slightly different way.  A good leader has to pay attention to what his spin doctors draw from focus group studies, after all.

Charles Krauthammer has done an excellent job describing how “Obama just doesn’t get it.”

From an article he wrote that came out January 2nd:

The reason the country is uneasy about the Obama administration’s response to this attack is a distinct sense of not just incompetence but incomprehension. From the very beginning, President Obama has relentlessly tried to downplay and deny the nature of the terrorist threat we continue to face. Napolitano renames terrorism “man-caused disasters.” Obama goes abroad and pledges to cleanse America of its post-9/11 counterterrorist sins. Hence, Guantanamo will close, CIA interrogators will face a special prosecutor, and Khalid Sheik Mohammed will bask in a civilian trial in New York — a trifecta of political correctness and image management.

And just to make sure even the dimmest understand, Obama banishes the term “war on terror.” It’s over — that is, if it ever existed.

Obama may have declared the war over. Unfortunately al-Qaeda has not. Which gives new meaning to the term “asymmetric warfare.”

And one of the chief ways Obama just doesn’t get it is Gitmo.  Rather than re-declaring war on terror (which his administration early on abandoned), Obama has made his central front the war on Gitmo.  Why?  Because he believed that it was our actions, rather than the hatred of the terrorists, that was causing the war.  And by allowing our enemy to dictate what we do or don’t do, Obama thought that we could pacify the enemy.

Charles Krauthammer stated how utterly asinine that thesis truly is while on the Fox News Special Report Panel:

CHARLES KRAUTHAMMER, SYNDICATED COLUMNIST: When you hear Gibbs talk about Guantanamo as a recruiting tool, this is what we hear over and over again. I mean, it’s as if he knows no history at all. The list of grievances that Al Qaeda has is endless and replenishing.

When Usama bin Laden declared war on the United States officially in a fatwa 1996 and 1998, the two top reasons were, a, the occupation of the holy places, Mecca and Medina, and, second, the suffering of the Iraqi people under anti-Saddam sanctions.

Well, there are no soldiers, American soldiers in Saudi Arabia anymore, and there are no sanctions obviously on Iraq. But the war continues. These excuses are endless.

Bin Laden sometimes starts the speech by saying in the name of Andalusia. Andalusia is Spain and Portugal, which was Muslim until it fell to Ferdinand and Isabel in 1492. Guantanamo Bay isn’t going to undo that.

The idea that we ought to send people when we have a rate of recidivism of 20 percent over all, but probably extremely high, much higher than that, for Yemen and Saudi Arabia who will rejoin the fight as a way to eliminate excuses, which are all that these are, these are not — these are excuses and not at all grievances, is absurd.

The reason the way is on is because Al Qaeda hates our way of life, our independence, our tolerance, our respect of women, and the threat it poses to the fanatical kind of Islam that they are advocating.

That’s right.  The Pentagon says that 1 in 5 released Gitmo detainees is returning to rejoin the militants.  But Obama is still fixated on emptying the place that keeps them from hurting anyone.

A few minutes later Krauthammer finished his thought:

In the end the issue isn’t Guantanamo. That’s a question of location. You can ultimately have it in the U.S., an abandoned air base in Alaska — who cares? It’s the question of defending the idea of detention without trial.

You do that in all wars, all countries do. You hold an enemy combatant until the war is over. And you have to argue that that is legitimate.

When Obama denies that this is a War on Terror, he takes away the legitimacy of that stand, and thus he has to end up releasing people.

Obama should be focused on trying to fill Gitmo to overflowing.  But he just wants to close it down out of an uncomprehending philosophy.

Gitmo didn’t even EXIST when the Jihadists launched the massive 9/11 attack against us.  The war in Iraq didn’t exist.  The war in Afghanistan didn’t exist.

To use any of these things as somehow causing the terrorists to hate us is beyond self-delusion.  But that has been precisely what Obama has done.

Regarding security, Obama again perpetuates the fundamental flaw of the left: focusing on protecting terrorists’ rights rather than focusing on protecting Americans’ lives.  Focusing on high-tech gadgets and budgets rather than on focusing on proven solutions that have worked for decades.  Focusing on your fingernail clippers and shampoo rather than focusing on the terrorists through profiling.

Obama is using Predator drones to massacre “alleged” terrorists in foreign countries without reading them their rights or filing charges against them in court.  Which I’m all in favor of.  Because we’re at war, and that’s what a country that is at war does.  The people attacking us are committing acts of war against the United States.  But then Obama irrationally and hypocritically files criminal charges against terrorists caught in the act of committing terrorism.

Obama is reading terrorists captured on foreign soil their Miranda rights.  Which is the quintessence of not having a clue.