Backhanded Compliments

The wingers are trying a new tack this week on blaming Obama for BP's oil spill as Obama's Katrina:  they're defending Obama. NRO's Yuri Levin sets ups the pins...

I think it’s actually right to say that the BP oil spill is something like Obama’s Katrina, but not in the sense in which most critics seem to mean it.

It’s like Katrina in that many people's attitudes regarding the response to it reveal completely unreasonable expectations of government. The fact is, accidents (not to mention storms) happen. We can work to prepare for them, we can have various preventive rules and measures in place. We can build the capacity for response and recovery in advance. But these things happen, and sometimes they happen on a scale that is just too great to be easily addressed. It is totally unreasonable to expect the government to be able to easily address them—and the kind of government that would be capable of that is not the kind of government that we should want.

You can feel the slime oozing out of Levin on this one like the oily mess washing up on Louisiana beaches.  Obama can't fix the problem because in Levin's view, the federal government is supposed to be incompetent and weak on domestic issues, and that's a good thing.  That virulent, rabidly anti-government Tourette's that wingers have rears its ugly head again, just another notch in the "Any Democratic administration is illegitimate" belt that they've been carving in since the Clinton years (and the Carter years before that).

Kevin Drum puts an end to this idiocy quickly.

The Deepwater Horizon explosion is almost the exact opposite [of Katrina]. There is no federal expertise in capping oil blowouts. There is no federal agency tasked specifically with repairing broken well pipes. There is no expectation that the federal government should be able to respond instantly to a disaster like this. There never has been. For better or worse, it's simply not something that's ever been considered the responsibility of the federal government. (The well capping, not the cleanup.)

In the case of Katrina, you have the kind of disaster that, contra Levin, can be addressed by the federal government. In the case of the BP spill, we're faced with a technological challenge that can't be. They could hardly be more different.

Wingers equate this to "See how useless government is?"  Thinking people equate this to "Boy, BP really should of had their act together."  As Digby reminds us, the last 20 months should have proven beyond a doubt that the whole "the best and the brightest among us go to the private sector" theory is a complete sham.