"We need leadership. Real leadership."
Jay Tea at wizbangblog quotes Glenn Reynolds aka Instapundit:
Professor Glenn Reynolds' oft-repeated aphorism: "I'll believe there's a crisis when the people who say there's a crisis act like there's a crisis." It's a great BS detector ....
More from the piece:
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The Obama administration wastes no opportunity to remind us of how dire the situation is in the Gulf. But its actions are utterly inconsistent with their words.
While the oil is still spewing, we have certain needs to best respond to the ongoing catastrophe. And those needs are not only being ignored by the Obama administration, but -- in some cases -- being actively sabotaged.
We need a strong, focused BP -- the people who ran the rig that failed so disastrously -- to lead the efforts in stopping the flow. They were the ones who ran it, who were in charge of it when it blew up. Unless we think they deliberately destroyed it, they are the best people to know exactly what happened and how best to stop it.
Instead, we have an administration that seems hell-bent on destroying BP. Hell, last week they extorted a $20-billion-dollar shakedown out of BP. And, cynically, the primary motive wasn't to get that money, but to secure the federal government's first dibs on BP's assets should they file bankruptcy in the US. This was the same move the Obama administration pulled with GM and Chrysler -- bypassing the normal rules of bankruptcy and screwing out the other creditors.
We need an easing of normal restrictions and limitations, freeing up all parties concerned to react swiftly to the impending slow-motion disaster. Instead, we have the Coast Guard turning away skimmers for inadequate life jackets, states being blocked from building berms due to long-term environmental impact concerns, foreign vessels and offers of assistance and expertise being ignored.
We need to find ways to minimize the immediate economic impact of the disaster, to somehow compensate for the loss of revenues from the damage in the Gulf. Instead, we have a proposed moratorium on all new offshore drilling, throwing even more people out of work, removing even more oil from our national supply.
We need to get the best and brightest and throw them at the problem. We need the experts, the geniuses, to figure out how best to stop the ongoing crisis, repair the harm it has caused, and prevent it from happening again.
Instead, we have a panel of experts finding their words distorted and their explicit rejection of a suspension of offshore drilling rewritten into an endorsement. And we have a new panel of "experts" who have absolutely no experience or knowledge of oil drilling, but have absolutely solid leftist credentials in Big Oil Bashing and environmental extremism.
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At this time, we -- as a nation -- need leadership. Real leadership.
We don't need an ass-kicker-in-chief. We don't need someone firing up the blamethrower and sending in the lawyers to make certain all i's are crossed and t's are dotted. We don't need partisan hacks making certain their opponents get the blame and their friends get benefits, regardless of the facts.
We don't need a community organizer in chief. We don't need someone to rally anger over Big Business and the politicians "owned" by Big Business, marshaling the high emotions provoked by the disaster to find a villain or villains to string up (hopefully, only in effigy) while the disaster continues unchecked.
What we need is a leader. A commander in chief. Someone who knows that the first thing you do in a disaster is stop the ongoing harm. The second thing you do is try to repair the harm done. The third thing you do is figure out what went wrong. The fourth thing you do is try to prevent it from happening again.
Only after all that is done to you apportion blame and punish those whose misdeeds caused or enabled or enhanced the disaster.
I find myself hoping that there's an explanation for the Obama administration's actions in response to the Deepwater Horizon oil blowout. That there is a method behind their madness, that there is some unifying theory or principle or belief that justifies all their actions so far.
But I'm not betting on it.
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