The BP Story So Far. . . Follow

They probably lose it to those Nigerian e-mail scammers. Those guys are rascals.

I think it's crap too, but it's the one being made at the moment to (and by) Davey.

Are you volunteering?

What's *your* plan?

My point is that the Obama administration took an approach to the spill designed to give them a "win/win" position, but it required that the oil spill actually be smallish and be plugged relatively quickly. They deliberately took a back-seat position so that they could publicly criticize BP for causing the disaster, demand that they "fix the leak", but not be subject to responsibility if things didn't go perfectly. That approach works *if* you are either a mid level political group and not actually subject to responsibility for the results regardless of the cause.

What happened to "the buck stops here"? Apparently, Obama didn't get that memo. He seems to think that it's sufficient to just blame BP for what has and is happening, but that's not going to wash.



Nope. That's not it at all. I'm not saying he needed to duplicate effort, but at least make sure that his people were involved in the process from day one, and if they felt that BP wasn't doing enough quickly enough to step up and help coordinate things. What it appears they did instead was stay as far away from the decision making and planning and calculating as possible so that they could claim ignorance when something didn't work (exactly as they are doing now), but make sure that the public knows that they're "pushing BP to fix the problem", so that they're on the people's side when folks get angry about it.


Again, had BP plugged the leak in the first few weeks, this plan would have worked out well. They can claim that they got BP to do what needed to be done, and then move on to getting BP to pay for all the damage that'll have to be cleaned up. But that didn't happen, did it? And the whole line of BS about how BP mislead them is just that: BS. If they didn't have access to that information, they should have. If they did have access to that information, they shouldn't have been relying solely on BP to provide them answers.

You don't have to duplicate the underwater work and whatnot, but you do need to be involved enough to make sure that the right actions are being taken and that the information you're getting is legitimate. If we're to believe the claims of ignorance, the government just plain didn't do this at all. Hence, my assumption that they chose to just sit back and spin the blame for the disaster rather than actually help in fixing it.

I got here way too late for a serious opinion (ie, after gbaji), so here is BP spills coffee.

Haha. Loved it.

This is how present-day politics works.

Conservatives are all for keeping the US government out of business, until the business is suddenly in trouble, then it's the government's responsibility to step in and fix their mistakes.

Same way that conservatives are all for keeping the government out of the personal business of individuals, until it comes to abortions, then the government is supposed to do everything they can to interfere with the rights of women.

And the way conservatives are all for the Constitution, except the teensy part about separation of church and state.

Edited, Jun 12th 2010 12:34pm by catwho

Cheap shots aside, There's nothing disingenuous with wanting small government that can still respond to emergencies.

Kevin Costner will save the gulf, and maybe BP in the process.

No. I think Obama and his senior staff all thought "Wow. This is just what we needed to focus negativity away from us and onto Republicans!". And they proceeded to run in 15 different directions stating up focus groups and mapping out strategies on how to use the spill to help gain support from their environmental base, and to help move forward with their green jobs initiatives, and how to spin it to help them stave off GOP victories in November. Hell, I can imagine that a couple weeks after the spill, they're in some meeting hashing out lists of quotes from Republicans saying "Drill baby Drill" and then someone asked "um... So who's got lead on working to stop the leak?", and the room went silent. Then everyone stood around saying "I thought you were going to deal with that?...".


That's basically what this looks like. A bunch of far left liberals who know how to capitalize on a disaster, but not how to deal with it while it's occurring. It honestly seems like they just figured someone else would solve the problem, so all they really had to do was handle the political side of things. But that's what you get when you fill your staff with people from activist backgrounds. Not surprising really...


But to answer your question: No. He assumed that BP would be able to just fix the leak within a week or two, so he focused the White House's attention on what to do after the disaster was over. I don't think it occurred to him that this might not happen, and that 50+ days later we'd still be looking at 24 hours of undersea footage of oil spewing into the Gulf. And now he's scrambling to figure out how to make it look like they were actively working with BP to fix the leak from day one, when it's abundantly clear that they weren't.