More Wishful Thinking On "Obama's Katrina"

Wingers seem to think if they say it enough times, the federal government's response to Lake Palin will become an impeachable offense.  Steve Benen and the AP put this nonsense to bed for good.

For several days, the national media seemed heavily invested in characterizing the BP oil spill disaster as "Obama's Katrina." Major, mainstream outlets -- not just Limbaugh and Fox News -- "concocted the absurd 'Obama's Katrina' claim in the first place, and then helped actively push it. Journalists did it by pointing to mostly faceless, imaginary 'critics' of the Obama administration in order to float the phony storyline."

But it didn't take. It may have had something to do with the intervention of other world events -- the attempted terrorism in Times Square, the European debt crisis, the British elections -- but vague criticism of the administration's response to the Gulf was relatively short-lived. Even conservatives found it easily dismissible.

When House Republican Conference Chairman Mike Pence (R-Ind.) held a press conference to blast the president's handling of the issue mid-week, he couldn't explain why he was unsatisfied, and most of the political world found it best to just blow off his shallow nonsense.

While the oil spill disaster remains an ongoing crisis -- indeed, oil continues to gush into the Gulf as I type -- the questions surrounding the speed of the Obama administration's response seem to have been answered. To the wire service's credit, the AP's H. Josef Hebert and Erica Werner published a lengthy report this morning on the "aggressive" federal response to the disaster.

That AP piece is a good read.  Unlike Katrina, which was predictable and indeed seen barreling towards the Louisiana coast for days before it hit, BP just now got around to trying to stop the oil flow, a good two and a half weeks after the accident...and their plan A failed miserably.  It's not Obama failing to fix this problem on national TV, it's BP dropping the ball.

Oh, and let's not forget the government's quick response to the Tennessee floods as well.

Last weekend's storm system devastated Tennessee and neighboring states, leaving at least 31 people dead across the Southeast, authorities say. Flooding has caused more than $1.5 billion in property damage in the Nashville area alone, city officials said Friday.

Napolitano said that as of Saturday morning, 16,000 people had requested assistance from the Federal Emergency Management Agency, and more than $4 million in federal assistance had been approved for individuals.

More of that help is coming.   Sorry Wingers, this isn't Obama's Katrina either.

If anything, the events of the last two weeks (Times Square, Tennessee, the Gulf Coast, and the stock market roller-coaster) show that a strong, responsive federal government is indeed necessary, and when it does its job, our government can get it done.

It's not the free market that's going to solve any of these problems, folks.