Shakedown, Breakdown, You're Busted

The "Obama Shakedown" meme continues this weekend courtesy of Daily Beast's Reihan Salam as he lays out the case that poor BP was victimized by the White House.

After taking a serious beating in the press for weeks over its handling of Deepwater Horizon, the Obama administration must be breathing a sigh of relief. In its desperate scramble to appear effective in combating the oil spill, the White House extracted extraordinary concessions from BP.

The most despised multinational working in the United States agreed to pay $20 billion over four years into a fund defined to benefit Gulf residents impacted by the spill. Some have characterized this as a shrewd decision on the part of BP CEO Tony Hayward to contain the damage to BP’s reputation. Yet BP has received no assurances on future legal liability and it remains, quite appropriately, on the hook for environmental damages. The Justice Department has already threatened to prosecute BP, and a refusal to play ball on BP’s part would almost certainly have led to an even more aggressive campaign of public vilification, at the very least.

On closer inspection, this doesn’t look like much of a negotiation. Rather, it looks like what one would colloquially refer to as a “shakedown,” in which a stronger party, ignoring the conventions of a good-faith negotiation, all but forces a weaker party to bend to its will. But now that Rep. Joe Barton has, in fact, called the White House agreement a shakedown, he has, despite backtracking and apologizing, taken the political heat off of the president. Somewhere, Rahm Emanuel is smiling.

One of the hallmarks of a true winger is despite the admission that BP is arguably the most despised corporation on Earth right now, the impetus to find a way to attack Obama is still the most irresistible force in their lives. Understand that getting this money set aside to help the American people cannot be seen as a victory to folks like Salam, as Obama is an implacable, unforgivable evil and he can never be allowed a victory in any arena.

Hence, the constant harping that Obama hasn't accepted enough help, hasn't plugged the damn hole, hasn't kicked anyone's ass, and now that complaint is "he's shaking down BP."

Salam even goes on to admit he belives Bush would have done the same thing because the "political returns would have been too great to resist."

Odd.  That's the same reason explaining why Salam is attacking Obama.  Funny how that works...