Put The Navy In Charge

Let us get the bad news out of the way first. The Resident has put a part timer in charge of oil spill operations. And of course the Resident is defending that decision.

Can the man who President Obama has tapped to formulate a long-term Gulf Coast restoration plan work only part-time on such a monumental effort?

Some environmental groups say no way and are suggesting that Ray Mabus should give up his post of Navy secretary to focus on the Gulf full-time.

The criticism comes after White House spokesman Robert Gibbs said Mabus, a former governor of Mississippi, will be splitting his time between the two jobs.

At least the guy has some contact with the Navy and knows the Gulf. Another big plus is that he is a Democrat.

Now for the real meat. Here is what a Louisiana politician had to say about the matter on 10 June.

Plaquemines Parish President Billy Nungesser told a Senate Homeland Security hearing today that the government and BP's command and control structure in responding to the Gulf oil spill disaster have been overly bureaucratic and slow to respond to the ongoing crisis.

"I still don't know who is in charge," Nungesser told the Subcommittee on State, Local and Private Sector Preparedness and Integration.

Nungesser said President Barack Obama should appoint someone with "the authority and guts to a make decisions." He said that currently it takes five days for questions to make their way up the chain of command to Admiral Thad Allen, the national incident commander, which Nungesser said was "much too slow."

The president and Allen have assigned Coast Guard officials to work with parish officials to cut through red tape, but Nungesser said it isn't working.

"If they have the authority they aren't using it," he said.

Ah. It isn't working. It seems nothing the Resident does is working. Except for paying off supporters and cronies.

Not to worry. The Idiot in Chief says he is going to give the Gulf spill every thing he has got.

Seeking to reassure Americans that his administration can handle the growing Gulf Coast oil crisis, President Obama promised Tuesday in his first address from the Oval Office to hold BP accountable for all costs and to "use everything we've got" in the federal response to the calamity.

Hours earlier, the scale of the problem widened dramatically when federal officials said in new estimates that the spill is at least 50% greater than previously known.

Evidently everything he has got is a part time director of operations.

Bill Quick is calling out (wanna fight?) the idiots who put President Present in office. Like the ass lickers in the media.

Listen up, you punked, chumped boobs: We looked at Obama not through your rose colored hallucinations, but through the cold, clear spectacles of reality. None of what he’s done since has surprised us one bit. In fact, many of us, myself included, predicted it even before his coronation by people like you. Yes, it’s nice that after a year and a half of horrible examples, the truth about him is finally beginning to penetrate your skulls. But why, for the love of god, couldn’t you see it at the beginning, when it was no less obvious, but your understanding of it might have done some good?

Actually, never mind. Since Obama’s election will turn out to be the worst thing to happen to the leftist project in America in the past hundred years, and will free a generation from the chains of leftist quackery at just the time such freedom is most sorely needed, I actually thank our lucky stars for useful idiots like you two. Without such, we might have been saddled with John McCain, and that would truly have been a disaster for conservatism, liberty, and America.

Sorry to say this. But I think he is right.

Let me add that the Brits are none too happy with President Absent.

If further proof were needed that the Obama administration’s relentless bashing of BP is seriously damaging America’s standing in Britain, a new YouGov poll shows that just 54 percent of Britons now have a favourable view of the United States, down from 64 percent before the Gulf oil spill. The poll, which surveyed 1,500 people on both sides of the Atlantic, also revealed that a significant majority of Britons believe that Barack Obama has harmed the Special Relationship. As The Sunday Times reports, “by 64% to 2% in Britain and by 47% to 5% in America, people believe the president’s handling of the crisis has damaged relations.” In addition, 22 percent of those surveyed in both the US and UK believe that President Obama is anti-British, a strikingly high figure among Americans.

Well a lot of those Brits depend on BP share prices to fund their retirement. So maybe that is understandable.

Wasn't Obama going to restore our special relationship with Europe that Bush had destroyed?

When Obama was campaigning for president (as did John Kerry before him), he harped on endlessly about “restoring” America’s standing in the world in the wake of the War on Terror and the Anglo-American led war in Iraq, as though world leadership were some sort of glib PR exercise. He excoriated the Bush administration for supposedly alienating US allies (no doubt he had the likes of France and Germany in mind), and imperiously lectured about the need to make America respected abroad.

But what has the Obama administration actually succeeded in doing? Seriously damaging relations with its closest ally, Great Britain, throwing loyal allies like Poland and the Czech Republic to the Russian bear, and sparking a major diplomatic spat with America’s closest friend in the Middle East, Israel. I don’t recall President Bush ever knifing US partners in the back, and siding for example with Washington’s enemies in Latin America by calling for negotiations over the sovereignty of British territory. Bush understood the meaning of alliances, and he also cherished the partnership with Great Britain. No one could ever accuse him of being anti-British.

You don't know what you've got 'til it's gone.

But what about the French? Here is a report from April of this year. A very long time ago it seems.

A new report circulating in the Kremlin today authored by France’s Directorate-General for External Security (DGSE) and recently “obtained” by the FSB shockingly quotes French President Nicolas Sarkozy as stating that President Barack Obama is “a dangerous[ly] aliéné”, which translates into his, Obama, being a “mad lunatic”, or in the American vernacular, “insane”.

According to this report, Sarkozy was “appalled” at Obama’s “vision” of what the World should be under his “guidance” and “amazed” at the American Presidents unwillingness to listen to either “reason” or “logic”. Sarkozy’s meeting where these impressions of Obama were formed took place nearly a fortnight ago at the White House in Washington D.C., and upon his leaving he “scolded” Obama and the US for not listening closely enough to what the rest of the World has to say.

I don't see how you can get closer to your friends without at least considering their opinions. As to "insane"? Only the people who voted for him. Well. I tried to warn you. But you wouldn't listen. You insane fools.


Not near soon enough.

H/T Instapundit

Cross Posted at Classical Values