"I'm angry and the people back in my state are very angry," Rep. Steve Scalise, R-Jefferson, fresh back from home, said in a speech on the House floor Monday afternoon, in which he waved a photo of a dead pelican and a copy of the Oil Pollution Act mandating the president to "ensure the effective and immediate removal of discharge."That's pretty goddamn funny. Republicans who fell all over themselves to allow BP to drill with no inspections, no oversight, no regulations in a culture of graft and kickbacks are blaming Obama for this.
Instead, he said, "the finger-pointer in chief" had been "ceding power to BP."
"Let's face it, we're a nation that likes to fix blame," said political scientist Larry Sabato of the University of Virginia. "So far BP has taken 90 percent of the hit because it's an oil company, always unpopular with the public, and President Obama has made sure BP takes the hit."The proper and intelligent response to this should be an immediate moratorium on offshore drilling, thorough inspections, and then to reopen the wells under control of the federal government. The GOP on the other hand wants the opposite: they want Obama to fix the problem now, but they want as little damage to BP's profit margin as possible...oh and no taxpayer money used to clean this up!
But, he said, "the longer this goes on, the more some fingers will point back at Washington. Clearly, his appointees weren't ready for this at all, and the president is stuck forever with that little piece of unfortunate video where he said oil drilling off the coast was very safe."
And the bottom line is that neither BP nor the federal government seem to have any sure-fire plans for stopping the leak or keeping the oil off the state's coast and out of its fragile marshes and wetlands.
If you think that makes no sense, it's because it makes no sense. But it's Obama's fault, whatever it is!
Much as in Katrina was Bush's fault...
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