Oh, by the way.

There have been a few times over the last few weeks where I’ve heard the following or something along the same lines, “Yeah, well you know it ain’t Obama’s fault... Bush fucked up the country!”

See,  I find this more than a little ironic.

The reason I think it’s ironic is because the people who are saying this are the very same people who laid the entire blame for the events of 9/11 at the feet of Bush too. I didn’t vote for Bush and I was never crazy about the guy but I was always amazed how a segment of the population wanted to pardon Slick Willy for being asleep at the switch.

Total bullshit but, people really did their level best to try and believe it.

And here we are, what? Two months in now on one of the worst environmental catastrophes ever to happen to our country and the very same people who pilloried Bush for his lackluster response to Katrina are making excuses for the Obama administration.


You know, as bad as the Exxon Valdez disaster was, this makes it look like small potatoes and just wait until we get a little deeper in the summer and hurricanes start making appearances in the gulf. This administration simply can’t get it right.


You would think I’m one of the tea-baggers (my slight against the Tea Party folks) but I have little patience for them too. They’re just a different face of the same problem.

This administration brings the good old days to mind... and I write that with the utmost of sarcasm. I haven’t seen this level of incompetence since the Carter administration. There too, the nation was lead by a Chief Executive who, while well-meaning, was ill-equipped to deal with the problems of the day. Two months now, oil has been leaking out into the Gulf - destroying fisheries, impacting the environment, demolishing tourism and throughout the entire debacle this administration has played some bizarre form of catchup, using double speak and hoping for the best.

Katrina was bad but this has the capacity to be longer lasting and more devastating as to make Katrina seem like a minor blip. And more than anything, the administration’s handling of this is emblematic of the incompetence that has been a hallmark of many of the actions they’ve taken.

The funny thing is, there are people who were the most ardent supporters of this administration in the months leading up to the election in 2008, who are now expressing their doubts and unhappiness. The reason they’re doing this is because this administration has been a disappointment. This is an administration that took office on the premise there would be less partisanship and more cooperation in government but time and time again when confronted by a problem of their own making, the current administration tries to foist blame on its predecessors.

The thing is there are some policies while fine on paper, really are unworkable when it comes to dealing with the problems of the real world. The brand of internationalism this administration has practiced has been an utter failure. In foreign policy time and again, the lofty ideals of the Obama administration where the United States builds a consensus and conducts its foreign policy based on the desires and goals of other nations has proven to be unworkable.

Look at North Korea, look at Afghanistan, look at Iran.

And when it does come time to get help from other nations, we turn it away:

The Dutch fall into the first group. Three days after the BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico began on April 20, the Netherlands offered the U.S. government ships equipped to handle a major spill, one much larger than the BP spill that then appeared to be underway. “Our system can handle 400 cubic metres per hour,” Weird Koops, the chairman of Spill Response Group Holland, told Radio Netherlands Worldwide, giving each Dutch ship more cleanup capacity than all the ships that the U.S. was then employing in the Gulf to combat the spill.

But remember, at the end of the day it’s all Bush’s fault. The one asset of this administration is the amazing sense of entitlement and lack of responsibility for their missteps. If there is one retrain that echoes in my mind at the moment, it is: ‘Lord save of from the well-meaning.’