Close All Shops In The Mall, Cancel The Three Ring Circus

The Economist has a good point: if you think President Obama hasn't done enough in the Gulf, shouldn't you be advancing the idea that we should shut down all offshore oil rigs?

Who's raising concrete critiques of administration policy? Chiefly Mr Obama. Last Thursday he laid out a series of mistakes he felt he had made. Chief among them was taking oil companies at their word when they claimed to have the capability to cope with worst-case deep-sea drilling catastrophes. Now, if we feel that the president has failed to act aggressively enough on this issue, both before and since the accident, then what course of action should we now be calling on him to take? One logical step might be for the government to immediately shut down every offshore drilling rig in proximity to America's coasts, pending the development of redundant, fail-safe capacity for capping and remediating catastrophic blowouts. Is this a good idea? I don't know. But if you wanted to argue concretely that the administration had not been acting aggressively enough in this crisis, then this is the sort of more-aggressive action you might be calling for.

And of course if Obama did this, he'd be slaughtered in the media and by the Republicans.  The Village cries out for "Daddy" to save us, but if Obama did that, he would be immediately portrayed as a fascist dictator of the highest order.

What we're seeing here is a perfect circus of media nothingball: people aggressively criticising the administration for not acting aggressively enough while aggressively ignoring the fact that they oppose anything aggressive the administration does.

It's almost like the entire Village is running on an irrational knee-jerk reaction to attack anything that Barack Obama does.

I wonder if there's a name for that?