Obama's 'Katrina' in the Gulf

The BP oil rig explosion will be President Obama’s ‘Katrina’ — in fact, it will potentially be much worse in terms of long term effect. While President Bush took a matter of a few days to mobilize federal assistance to flooded New Orleans, Obama has demonstrated near-complete incompetence and inaction over a month and counting. Still, there is no leadership or clear-cut solution to answer one of the worst environmental disasters in modern time. Eleven people are dead, fisheries and scores of fragile ecosystems dying day-by-day. President Obama finds himself deservedly being attacked from the left and the right.

Environmental activist Robert Redford is demanding action from the administration. When Barack Obama starts losing the Robert Redfords of the world — something is terribly wrong. Redford has even taken to the airwaves with the Natural Resources Defense Council, a liberal special interest group, to call the President out on the lackluster response to the spill and feet-dragging on energy legislation. Robert Redford has every right to be angry, along with boaters, fishermen, Governors, Mayors and the millions who live, vacation and work on the Gulf. I suspect there will be more than a few NRA members who will dearly miss duck hunting along Lousiana’s once-pristine marshlands.

The White House answer to the disaster in the Gulf: ‘let BP handle it.’ Put the oil company in charge of the epic disaster they created. Every day, the tendrils of the slick reach further into currents that will carry the sludge to new shores, killing everything in its path. To disperse the oil, BP is dumping hundreds of thousands of gallons of chemicals into the Gulf — to the alarm of the EPA. Increasingly, independent scientific estimates place the amount of oil at 14 times the amount stated by BP. So, what is President Obama’s position on all this? He doesn’t have one. What is the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s (NOAA) official assessment of the magnitude of this mess? There isn’t one. And that’s the problem.

There is no one manning this ship. As Redford said recently in an interview “In this case, we don’t need a disaster manager, we need a leader.” If that sounds like a sound bite you might hear on Fox News, think again — he said it on MSNBC’s Keith Olberman program. The Obama administration seems content to allow BP to stick tubes in the toxic gusher, poke and prod it while the President finger-points. President Obama has so far tried blaming it all on President Bush, President Clinton, the Minerals Management Service, BP, Halliburton — anyone but himself. Redford points out, “the Gulf disaster is more than just a terrible oil spill, it’s the product of a failed energy policy.” What do you think a national energy policy should or shouldn’t be? We may as well start figuring this mess out, it’s clear our leaders need some serious help.