As is his pattern, you know our Chief Executive is trying and blame the BP oil spill on George W. Bush. Nevertheless, Team Obama is having to douse a few oil slicks of their own, ones being noticed even by the mainstream press.* Of all the politicians who have received campaign contributions from British Petroleum, Barack Obama got the biggest chunk of all.
* Department of the Interior chief of staff Tom Strickland (it is his agency responsible for responding to the huge oil spill) being remarkably absent from the disaster scene because he was, ahem, white-water rafting in the Grand Canyon.
* Criticism of the government's sluggish response has come even from such places as the New York Times.
* John Fund reports in the Wall Street Journal,
The Obama Administration has tirelessly pushed the line that it has employed every available tool to fight the Gulf oil spill from "Day One." Well, it's certainly true that every media resource is being deployed to squelch comparisons with the slow-footed 2005 Bush administration response to Hurricane Katrina.
But as for having actual oil-spill fighting technology on hand before the crisis, as the Oil Pollution Act of 1990 requires, the administration was clearly caught unprepared.
After the Transocean rig blew up two weeks ago, it turns out the federal government didn't have a single fire boom on hand in the Gulf to enable a controlled burn of the oil slick, according to The Press-Register of Mobile, Alabama. Instead, the government quickly purchased the only fire boom that an Illinois-based manufacturer had in stock, and then asked the company to call its customers around the world to see if the U.S. government could borrow their booms...
