Barack Obama has a unique ability to drive his opponents into the most bizarre contortions. When Lehman Brothers fell, we saw McCain abandon the campaign trail to rush to Washington. To do absolutely nothing. Prompting Obama to observe dryly that a President ought to be able to do more than one thing at a time.
Now there is a frenzy on the Right Wing over the true victims of the oil spill in the Gulf: BP. Yes,many think that it is BP that is being unfairly "shaken down" "Chicago-style". It is not just Rep. Joe Barton (R-BP). All of Fox Nation has yet another reason to be angry. They are just a little confused about who is to blame for the catastrophe in the Gulf. Whoever is at fault it cannot be BP.
The same people who used to scream that the Government should get off the backs of the oil industry by deregulating it, now claim that it is the gummint itself that caused the disaster:
On the one hand, government is regulating the snot out of the oil industry... We tell them where they can or can't drill, where they can or can't build a refinery, heck, they even have to check with us before they are allowed to poop! Why, after the rig went boom, over here in Washington it took us over a month just to figure out which agency to scapegoat (out of the dozen supposedly regulating them). The Bureau of MMS lost the lottery on that one.
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So, first government over-regulated the industry out into the deep water, then government failed at implementing our own mandated inspection regulations (among other things).
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the US govt is the bad guy, didn't regulate, didn't do their job like usual, overlooked all the BP violations to extend the lease. Now they haven't done much in 60 days to clean it up, get it stopped and in addition to their gross and utter incompetence
That is right folks. The Gummint regulated too much. It also didn't regulate.
And the latest accusation is that the $20B cleanup fund from BP will be used to pay for health care. How outrageous! Some of that money will be used to pay for the health care of the people affected in the Gulf states. Because when you leak 50,000 gallons of toxins a day into the Gulf, you should not have to pay for the people who get sick because of it. It is interesting that the outrage is directed at moderate Democrat Bart Stupak as much as Obama.
A new theme is emerging in all this. Obama is the worst thing to hit felonious American Corporations since FDR. May be even TR. The NYTimes:
To Mr. Obama, this is all about rebalancing the books after two decades in which multinationals sometimes acted like mini-states beyond government reach, abetted by a faith in markets that, as Mr. Obama put it at Carnegie Mellon University a few weeks ago, “gutted regulations and put industry insiders in charge of industry oversight.” When Representative Joe L. Barton, the Texas Republican, opened hearings Thursday about the gulf oil gusher by accusing Mr. Obama of an unconstitutional “shakedown” of BP to create a “slush fund,” he was giving voice to an alternative narrative, a bubbling certainty in corporate suites that Mr. Obama, whenever faced with crisis that involves private-sector players, reveals himself to be viscerally antibusiness
Only a few months ago it looked like the Republicans were poised for a victory in the 2010 midterm elections. Certainly, the president's party is at a disadvantage. But with Rand Paul and Joe Barton to kick around, may be we have a chance after all. FDR:
I should like to have it said of my first administration that in it the forces of selfishness and of lust for power met their match.
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I should like to have it said of my second administration that in it these forces met their master.”