Madam Moonbeam: "Bush did it"

I keep hearing all of this incessant noise about how Barack Obama supposedly failed us by not pulling an enormous cork out of his briefcase and personally putting an end to the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico.

Sorry, but it’s patently absurd to suggest that an elected official be held accountable for something that is obviously beyond his level of expertise. He’s just an ambitious guy from Chicago, not a veteran oil industry troubleshooter.

Despite the drubbing he took at the time, the same could be said for George Bush when Katrina flooded New Orleans. Um, sorry, but it takes a few days to assemble a mile-long caravan of 5-ton amphibious transport vehicles, the oodles and oodles of emergency supplies and then get them to the site of the unfolding disaster. But as we all know, the one thing Bush never received from the left side of the political aisle or the ever-circling and ravenous press was any slack. Far from it.

If a meteorite the size of a stress ball entered the Earth’s atmosphere quite unexpectedly, it was his fault. If some little-known lake was host to algae blooms, it was his inattentiveness that caused it. And if a bicycle tire went flat anywhere above the Rio Grande, it was Bush again. What a bastard!

But this here poppycock, this intellectual flatulence, this continual resistance of all things sanity is just too much.

Pelosi blames Bush administration for BP oil spill

“Many of the people appointed in the Bush administration are still burrowed in the agencies that are supposed to oversee the [oil] industry,” Pelosi said when asked if Democrats could have prevented or mitigated the crisis by keeping a closer watch on the industry.

Added the Speaker, “the cozy relationships between the Bush administration’s agency leadership and the industry is clear…I’ve heard no complaints from my members about the way the president has handled it,” Pelosi stated.

First of all, Obama basically pulled the “the buck stops here” card already by saying that the ultimate responsibility for the many and varied and continuing responses to the oil rig disaster lies with him. Something I personally do not believe. I don’t see how we can blame some politician for a massive industrial accident and it‘s aftermath.

But…Obama has been in office for a year and a half now. And he has majorities in both the Senate and the House of Representatives. And if Nancy Pelosi even thought for a fleeting moment that the oversight of the oil industry was lacking, or that some appointed officials were too cozy in their relationships with oil industry executives, then why didn’t she or her fearless leader do something about it long before the oil rig exploded?

Sorry, Madam Moonbeam, but you can’t blame the previous manager for policies and/or personnel issues that you allowed to persist for a year and a half after the change in management. That will never cut it in the private sector, so I fail to understand why it should cut it in the fouled-up public sector.

If there was an identified problem a year and a half ago, and that very same problem exists today, Moonbeam, you own it. You are now solely responsible for it. The proverbial buck stops with the new management team for allowing those obvious shortcomings to continue.

It was unfortunate when some felt it was necessary to politicize a hurricane, and it’s equally unfortunate and regrettable that some now feel that we have to play politics with an oil rig disaster.

Despite what many believed going in, Obama cannot part the blue sea with a mere flick of his wrist. And he cannot brainstorm for a day or two and put to rest a disaster of epic proportions.
But with all of that typed, it is equally ridiculous and foolhardy to blame George W. Bush for unforeseen events and their unwanted circumstances until the long-overdue Rapture finally comes to bare.

Madam Moonbeam, you got the House, you got the Senate and you got the White House. Use it or loose it. Fix it or what have you. But spare me with the increasingly galling fall-back position that is the never-ending “the buck stopped way back there” abrogation of responsibility. And if you inherited problems from the Bush years, either fix them or take responsibility for allowing them to persist.

While it’s painfully obvious to practically everyone not personally invested in him that Barack Obama is in well over his swelled head, it’s equally obvious that Madam Moonbeam is incapable of providing any semblance of capable leadership.

If all that you’ve got in your threadbare repertoire is “Bush did it,” you need to join Bush in retirement.

Sez me.

Later