Thursday, June 17, 2010

Our Potemkin President

The President's popularity continues to fall at an alarming rate. Much of the fall seems to be as a direct result of the lack of competence exhibited by the White House.  The most recent example being the Gulf Oil Disaster, for which the President has said that his administration has been on top of it since the very first day.  What the spinmeisters cannot seem to fathom, is that means all of the problem is his fault.
The reality of course, is that he was not in charge.  In other words, he lied.  But the administration is caught in a mess of their own making.  All of the usual fallbacks (It's Bush's fault) are no longer available.  Instead, the President who promised us competence is demonstrating how difficult that really is.
The usual solutions are trotted out of course: We need more regulations!  The only question I have, is what have you done with the ones that you already have?  But Washington's solution is always going to be more control, more bureaucrats, more money in order to once and for all eliminate the problem.  Never mind that the regulations were ignored by the MMS, that is just a continuation of the inefficiency of regulations.  Remember Bernie Madoff, the Ponzi scheme guy?  He had the SEC supervising his activities, at least as long as those activities were on a porn site.  Same with the MMS inspectors who were wined, dined, and given access to prostitutes in order to approve the BPoil drilling.
If Obama really wanted to make regulations work, I would suggest that he quit trying to threaten BP with criminal protection, but instead, prosecute the bureaucrats who failed in their jobs.  At the least, you should be able to prosecute them for felony theft for taking their paychecks under false pretenses.
Come to think about it, Obama may be guilty of that as well.  But I guess he can pronounce nuclear, even though he can't pronounce corpsman.

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