'SERVES HIM RIGHT'.... Conservative columnist George Will said this morning that President Obama is "
being unfairly blamed" for the response to the BP oil spill disaster. But, Will added, he's glad the president is receiving the unfair criticism anyway.
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If we were to take Will's point to the next step -- the federal government lacks the wherewithal to fix every problem, so some tasks should be left in the hands of private enterprise and the states -- I suppose the lesson is we should have BP and Louisiana state agencies solve the problem.
That ought to work, right?
At this point, the discourse seems to boil down to a) those who want to see the president
don a wetsuit and head to the Gulf floor; b) those who want to see the president don a cape and fly around the planet
really quickly in order to reverse time; and c) those who want to see the president pound on podiums and lose his cool, as if that would make a difference. (Thanks, Maureen Dowd, for
comparing Obama to Spock again. That never gets old.)
Here's an idea for assignment editors: publish a piece with specific steps federal officials should take but haven't. Because at this point, unless we can fix the leak with useless media palaver, there's not much point to the breathless speculation, nebulous criticism, and finger-pointing.