Obama again shows leadership with his handling of the BP oil spill.
So what do the right-wingers like Thomas Lindaman do (On EARLY SATURDAY MORNING since they had nothing better to do on a Friday night because they're a fucking loser)?
They just say the opposite (again).
I seem to recall the Coast Guard dealing with the fire and spill from the beginning. With FEMA and the Air Force joining operations shortly after. The Coast Guard has the means to deal with oil spills, as does BP. The problem is that the leak was underestimated initially, which, of course, will lead to a later, heavier response.
So, what do the right-wingers say? Three guesses!
Ding-ding! It's OBAMA'S FAULT!
Obama acts fast, so the right-wingers say he didn't act fast enough. Amazing, aren't they?
The "small government" Teabaggers are bawling about how much we need government leadership. BP told the government multiple times... "We can handle the spill! It's not an issue!" This was private property, so the government had a severe lack of authority and power over private issues despite what idiots like the "small government" Teabaggers would like you to think... but even then, the Coast Guard and FEMA were skimming the oil off and putting out fires. Four days later, government officials and scientists realized it was worse than BP was trying to say. So immediate action went into place to do more than what BP was doing and increased the effort. The Coast Guard was there on Hour One that it happened. By contrast, since the right-wingers are desperately trying to compare this to Katrina: It took FOUR DAYS to get those people out of the superdome. They didn't start evacuating it until DAY THREE. Also they knew Katrina would strike TWO DAYS before and knew it was Category Five the day before it hit. They did NOTHING until September 1st to get FEMA there, and they were heavily disorganized and uncentralized due to no command. Oh, and I don't remember President Obama playing guitar or eating cake while this was going on, either. In other words, fuck you and your bullshit attempts at comparisons. You fail, right-wingers. Obama had FEMA and the Coast Guard on the scene with robots to try and stop the leak and buoys to try and contain them. The logistics of the matter are extremely complicated. Stopping the actual leak itself takes a lot of technology that can not be set up overnight. Containing it is very hard. The Obama Administration was on the scene as soon as the accident occurred and immediately started trying to contain the spill once they learned that it was leaking as much as it was.
The Coast Guard rescued scores from that doomed platform before it sank. And this was while BP was trying to mislead public officials about how much oil was spilling out. That's why BP ultimately took responsibility when it comes to response times. I think it's telling that BP isn't even trying to spin this. Normally the lawyers and PR flaks would be out in full force right now, but this is such a colossal screw up that there's just no spinning it. I know the Fox Brigade, Teabaggers, and right-wingers are trying like mad to find some hook, but it just isn't there.
Boats putting out the fire:
Also they were on the scene with robots after trying to stop the leak.
The right-wingers continue to try to use all the stuff we said about Bush against Obama. The problem is that it never works. Get some fresh material, guys. You guys are the Carlos Mencia of spin.
It doesn't matter. If you start out setting to prove that Obama is wrong, and it's all his fault, well, then it doesn't really matter what happened in reality. Reality, even in a catastrophe, is secondary to politics for these crazy right-wing people. Why bother dealing with someone with that broken kind of mind? These people either believe their own shit, and they're crazy; or they don't, and they're liars. No sense arguing with a crazy person, or with a liar.
In an apparent effort to make this "Obama's Katrina", both Hannity and Rush are lobbing accusations that this administration has done nothing about this for over a week, despite the fact that the Coast Guard was on it from Hour One. I wouldn't be surprised if that becomes the accepted narrative on the right. The mental gymnastics to not only conceive of such a complaint, but to say it with a straight face, is pretty impressive if nothing else. Then again, it's just ecology, right? I mean... we're capitalists. Little green rectangular pieces of paper are FAR more important than our surroundings. I'm surprised the right isn't pissed off that money is being spent on the cleanup in the first place. Oh... wait... we have a Democratic president.
So now our born-again "fiscal conservative" Republicans are suddenly born-again environmentalists. How convenient. Bush wasn't responsible for Hurricane Katrina. However, as President, he was responsible for the agency that handled disaster relief, that being FEMA. We knew for years that the levies were vulnerable. We knew for two weeks that Katrina was coming. We knew three days in advance that the storm would track directly over New Orleans. We knew the day before that Katrina was Category Five. There was just no excuse for any of the authorities not to be ready. Bush appointed a completely unqualified, incompetent jackass to lead the agency, thus making its flailing response HIS FAULT. Period.
The BP spill is directly attributable to BP's poor engineering (and even more directly to Halliburton) - BP is a private company, and thus Obama is not in charge of it, or responsible for its decision making. The only federal agency that is remotely qualified to help with mitigate this disaster is the Coast Guard, and they've been on things from HOUR ONE, not Day One. As Katrina approached, people kept wondering why FEMA wasn't calling up every aid element they could, and moving them to staging points outside the hurricane path as close as they could safely get to NOLA so they could rush in as soon as the storm had passed. It was amazing, the utter incompetence that followed over the next two weeks as people starved, killed and died. It was a break down in communication on all ends, and Bush picking a judge from a horse competition to head FEMA was definitely not one of his brightest ideas.
By contrast, the Obama Administration dispatched Coast Guard elements immediately, offered support to BP to contain the spill, and started doing everything he could right away. If there were warning three days prior to the explosion, with people screaming "This oil rig is going to explode!!" and Obama ignored the warnings and played guitar, THEN you could say something of substance. It's kinda hard to take right-wing criticism over this crisis seriously when you clodhoppers are always cheering when something bad happens. You guys JUST DON'T CARE. So please stop pretending. You tried this with the Olympics and it backfired, revealing the already obvious fact that you guys don't give a shit about this country. You also recently tried this when the ice storm hit Kentucky and it didn't stick then, either. So you are making sure to lay the bullshit on REALLY thick this time around.
Face it - you guys always lie, but none of that matters to you. Only the noise does. Perhaps if there were a little more ranting about safety, regulation and licensing, there'd be no spill, no dead miners, and no dead roughnecks. But those are things you guys always fight AGAINST. And throughout all of this, the right-wingers have yet to explain exactly what Obama could have done that he hasn't done. All of the criticism I'm hearing from the hicks is: "Obama should have acted faster." To do what? At least with Bush, people can point to actual steps FEMA could have taken to improve their response to the disaster. When the feds arrived in New Orleans a few days after Katrina they blockaded the city and actually turned the local rescue boats away. Closing the city killed people. That was inexcusable. Funny, I'm not hearing ANY of that with this issue.
The whole "You didn't act fast enough" is just as much of a lie as when you lied about Obama's response to the Underwear Bomber.
To summarize, you people on the right are (again) proven idiots, and so are all your Fox News fellating ilk.
You can keep lying until you're blue in the face, you're just failing again.
