Which Will They Blame Him For?
Not much in the news the last few days. Man, I wonder if someone somewhere will add up the number of minutes of news coverage that Bush and Cheney's failed war in Iraq got compared to how much Obama's success in Libya warranted. Anyway, what I have been wondering about is which way the Republicans will try to blame Obama for something having to do with Irene, the hurricane moving up the East coast.
At first, I thought that their take on the whole thing would be to find that Obama totally over-reacted to the hurricane, playing into their narrative that Democrats don't do anything except spend money and expand government intervention. But then I got to thinking about Bush and Katrina, and it occurred to me that they might need to pretend that Obama grossly under-reacted to Irene, since they love to pretend that Obama shares Bush's monstrous inadequacies, hoping to get people to forget what an abominable job Republicans did on everything when they were in charge.
Probably, they will try to do both. We'll see.
At first, I thought that their take on the whole thing would be to find that Obama totally over-reacted to the hurricane, playing into their narrative that Democrats don't do anything except spend money and expand government intervention. But then I got to thinking about Bush and Katrina, and it occurred to me that they might need to pretend that Obama grossly under-reacted to Irene, since they love to pretend that Obama shares Bush's monstrous inadequacies, hoping to get people to forget what an abominable job Republicans did on everything when they were in charge.
Probably, they will try to do both. We'll see.
Comments
As for the Right - over or under-react - probably the will accuse him of both in which ever context it suits them.
Where it comes to helping poor people, making sure they don’t get locked up with thugs in some stadium somewhere, providing medical aid or sanitation measures, and not providing (say) the world with the inglorious spectacle of bodies left for days on the streets of major American city...
oh THAT will be over-reacting.
But otherwise it’ll be “What? He actually slept in the last 72 hours? That lazy ni-ni…. nihilist! Maybe he was dreaming about his golf score… or he was on the phone to his relatives in Kenya. My God the Obama children had ice-cream for dessert… what kind of example is that? Why wasn’t he zooming around in an airplane in a cowboy hat with binoculars and otherwise looking presidential?”
Oh and as usual all solutions will be to let private enterprise take over everything.
The answer would be more deep water drilling WITHOUT secondary wells.
Republican reasoning goes something like this: The economies of Alabama, Mississippi and Lousisana have been destroyed by the impact of the oil spill and the hurricane so we need to put those poor long-suffering people back to work as soon as we can. The best way we do this is to issue as many drilling permits as possible as fast as we can without really taking serious precautions against another major oil spill. (Bobby Jindell and Trent Lott have both made the argument that since no drilling platform was wiped out by hurricane Katrina this proves they are safe) And so what if there is another oil spill? We can blame Obama.
Quite frankly, if there is another oil spill from a deep-water well in the Gulf of Mexico maybe he should be held accountable.
Even though he has shuffled around regulatory/investigative agencies for the oil industry and renamed them....they are still woefully understaffed and underfunded. They're pretty much run by the same people that were running them before the BP disaster. We all know who they are.