The oil spill in the Gulf AKA Obamatrina has been a disaster for everyone involved. Millions of ordinary people who did nothing wrong are taking a huge economic hit, it's a genuine environmental disaster, BP may end up going bankrupt over the whole disaster, and Obama's incompetence has been so galling that even Democratic apparatchiks like James Carville and Chris Matthews are criticizing him publicly.
The political beating Obama has taken over the spill has been entirely appropriate. After all, this is a far left-wing President who believes in inserting the federal government into EVERYTHING because he thinks there's nothing government can't do better than the private sector. Run the banks? Run the auto companies? Student loans? Healthcare? You name it and Barack Obama wants the government to control it.
Of course, the government can't handle any of those industries any better than it can this oil spill, but there's the rub: This time, there's no waiting. People are getting to see the failure of government in the Gulf in real time. Here's a test of the government's preparation and competence that can be judged by a simple standard: How long will it take to "plug the damn hole" and get the mess cleaned up? Answer: Apparently a long, long, long, long time.
Yet, what is Obama primarily being criticized for? His inability to even pretend that he cares more about the Gulf than his golf game. His creepy autocratic demand that BP give him 20 billion dollars to use how he sees fit instead of staying within the law of the land. His disengagement. His flat emotionless response to this disaster. His inability to make any significant progress, even though he has admitted that his administration, not BP, is calling all the shots.
While these are all valid grounds for criticism, there's another area where Obama has actually been getting much more of a pass than he deserves: His administration has greatly hindered the clean-up efforts in the Gulf. In other words, there are businesses that have been ruined, people's livelihoods lost, and beaches that have oil on them today as a direct result of the Obama Administration's incompetence. It's a real world example of Ronald Reagan's famous quotation, ”The nine most terrifying words in the English language are, ‘I'm from the government and I'm here to help.’" Here's some of the "help" the Obama Administration has provided to the Gulf states in the aftermath of this crisis: