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.

H1N1 Vaccine As Proof Of Mind-Boggling Obama Incompetence

Remember when President Obama “declared a national emergency to deal with the “rapid increase in illness” from the H1N1 influenza virus.” Boy did they ever get the ball rolling after that.

Even as it became increasingly obvious that the administration was falling woefully behind in their H1N1 production goals, they continued to urge people to demand the vaccine.  The result was more typical of Soviet-era bread lines than the U.S.A.

Not only am I not able to get this stupid vaccine, but both my doctor and my dentist have told me that they aren’t able to get it, either.

Even The New York Times pointed a finger at Obama last month in an article entitled as “H1N1 Widespread in 46 States as Vaccines Lag“:

Federal officials predicted last spring that as many as 120 million doses could be available by now, with nearly 200 million by year’s end. But production problems plagued some of the five companies contracted to make the vaccine. All use a technology involving growing the vaccine in fertilized chicken eggs; at most of them, the seed strain grew more slowly than expected.

The manufacturers are “working hard to get vaccine out as safely and rapidly as possible,” Dr. Frieden said. But since it is grown in eggs, “even if you yell at them, they don’t grow faster.”

Since last winter’s more isolated cases of swine flu, the expectation that the virus would return with a vengeance in this flu season had posed a test of the Obama administration’s preparedness.  Officials are mindful that the previous administration’s failure to better prepare for and respond to Hurricane Katrina in 2005 left doubts that dogged President George W. Bush to the end of his term.

The Obama government predicted 120 million doses, but – as the article makes clear – they have only 30 million.  This is an absolute disaster – and it is entirely appropriate to compare this level of sheer incompetence to George Bush’s “Katrina moment.”

And blaming the delays that will leave Americans woefully exposed to H1N1 is tantamount to George Bush blaming the Hurricane Katrina response on the American Red Cross.  That pig just doesn’t fly, Barry Hussein.

This is not good:

Swine flu, also known as H1N1, may infect as much as half of the population and kill 30,000 to 90,000 people, double the deaths caused by the typical seasonal flu, according to the planning scenario issued yesterday by the President’s Council of Advisers on Science and Technology. Intensive care units in hospitals, some of which use 80 percent of their space in normal operation, may need every bed for flu cases, the report said.

A revised report from the CDC dated November 12 demonstrates that all the kings horses and all the king’s men really don’t have a whole lot of a clue as to what is going on:

CBS/AP) Federal health officials now say that 4,000 or more Americans likely have died from swine flu – about four times the estimate they’ve been using.

If you go back and survey this slowly unfolding disaster, you will find that the Obama government has routinely been wrong by a factor of between 400% – 500%.  At some point you’d think the mainstream media would really start coming unglued over this incompetence.  But not so much (hint: the president is a Democrat).

Are conservatives wrong to blast Obama for this gross incompetence?

Not if history counts for anyting (which it usually doesn’t with liberals).  Amy Geiger-Hemmer writes:

Remember a few short years ago how President Bush was just ripped apart by the mainstream media and blamed for flu vaccine shortages?  Most Democrat representatives acted outraged at the President and his inability to have enough flu vaccines available for the American people during flu season.   Hillary Clinton and John Kerry are two excellent examples:

From:  Hillary Clinton blasts Bush on Vaccine Shortage: (October 18, 2004)

“They’re more interested in tax cuts for the rich than for flu shots for everyone who needs them,” Clinton railed Monday afternoon at a press conference at New York’s Ryan/Chelsea-Clinton Community Health Center.Found this on “The Daily Kos” – so lefties will believe it:

Remember this from October of 2004:

Democrats have seized on the vaccine shortage to accuse the administration of being unable to protect Americans – from either illness or terrorism. “If you can’t get flu vaccines to Americans, how are you going to protect them against bioterrorism?’‘ Senator John Kerry, the Democratic presidential candidate, asked in an interview with National Public Radio. “If you can’t get flu vaccines to Americans, what kind of health care program are you running?”…” (WOW!!!! Imagine if ANYONE would ask Obama this same question?)

And that was just an ordinary flu year.  No “national emergencies.”  No super-flu.  No flu that kills four times as many people as authorities predicted it would.

Not that Democrats (and that includes the mainstream media) are capable of being fair or objective, but if they were only capable of turning their demagoguery on themselves…

This is not only a shocking failure, but an incredibly dangerous and potentially deadly failure as well:

“I’m worried the virus (H1N1) is getting ahead of the public health system’s ability to control it” — Senator Joe Lieberman (I)

And the fact that the Obama administration assumed control of the flu vaccine in an unprecedented way make Obama and the Democrats even more blameworthy yet:

There are extreme shortages of the H1N1 vaccine all over the U.S. As a result, people are getting sick and they are dying. This pandemic is raging, and spreading like wildfire, and for the first time ever the private sector has been removed from the process of distributing the vaccine.

It has been standard operating procedure in the past for private industry to distribute vaccines that were needed for the greater good of the people. Now, however, with the H1N1 vaccine and the Obama administration in charge, the government has taken over all responsibility for distribution of the vaccine to the states via the CDC.  The government has failed so miserably in distributing the vaccine that now the [DEMOCRAT!!!] U.S. Senate is investigating their incompetence and possible corruption.

Picture this if you will, right now in the U.S. Senate, The Homeland Security Committee headed by Joe Lieberman (Independent and former Democrat), is investigating the complete and total incompetence and perhaps corruption, as well as the assertions from some that the Obama administration is playing political favorites with your lives, as it relates to one area of health care while at the same time another Senate committee is gathered trying to hammer together legislation that would allow the U.S. government to take total control over all health care in the U.S.

Lieberman’s committee is trying to determine why the U.S. Government so grossly underestimated the amount of vaccine that would be available and why the vaccine may be available when it’s too late.

“It’s moved with alarming speed and took an exceptionally high toll at a time of year when we don’t encounter a high number of flu cases.  Flu spikes typically occur in January.  We’re in October … and the number of cases is higher than what we usually see at the flu’s peak in January,” Lieberman said this morning.

There are also accusations by some that Blue States are receiving the vaccine in multiples far higher than Red States regardless of population. As an example; Texas, a traditionally Republican stronghold and the second most populous state in the union is ranked at number 48 in terms of vaccinations received.

Is the Obama administration saying that if your state voted Republican then it is okay for H1N1 to kill your kids, or you?

We’re talking about the worst kind of incompetence.  And now we’re talking about the most hateful form of partisan viciousness ever seen in this country from the man whose “core promise” during the campaign was that he would transcend the political divide.

And the point that the Democrat candidate for president asked (see above) in 2004 applies BIG TIME now: “If you can’t get flu vaccines to Americans, what kind of health care program do you think you CAN run?”

Are you going to allow these clowns to run your health care system?  Are you going to trust them with your life?  Are you going to put another 1/5th of the economy under their control?

Speaking of the economy, this isn’t merely a health disaster; it is increasingly likely that it will create a massive economic disaster as well.

I’m sure you are aware that many retail businesses make 70% of their profits during the Christmas season?  What happens if people are afraid to shop for fear of the H1N1 Obama Death?

Consider that what is increasingly likely to become a health disaster is even more likely to be an economic disaster, as H1N1 escalates its attack during the Holidays and the Christmas shopping season, with still no significant stocks of vaccine available.

How much longer can Obama keep blaming Bush for his growing list of failures?