An angry, frustrated President Obama reportedly exhorted aides to just “plug the damn hole” a week after the crude oil and natural gas began blowing out of BP’s Deepwater Horizon well a mile below the surface of the Gulf of Mexico. Here’s a better piece of advice for Obama, his aides, and everybody else in Washington dealing with what is rapidly becoming the worst environmental disaster in American history: Stop the damn politics, quit pointing fingers, and focus on finding a solution. Nothing else matters until the well is capped. What has been desperately needed from the beginning of this tragedy is leadership. What we’ve gotten instead from the White House has been blame shifting, bureaucratic gamesmanship, and political opportunism.
All three elements reached an apotheosis Wednesday when New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd wrote that a senior Obama official had lamented that the administration, in Dowd’s words, “should have acted more urgently to re-examine the dark legacy of Cheney in the Energy and Interior Departments.” That’s just great — hundreds of thousands of gallons of raw crude oil have been erupting into the Gulf for more than a month and the president’s men are trying to steer the blame to Dick Cheney? That Obama’s most trusted advisers are indulging in such partisan lunacy in the second month of this crisis is a staggering commentary on how inadequate these people are to the demands of the moment.
