It's becoming increasingly clear that for many liberals in the punditocracy, they sense something almost existential about how this is playing out. Writing as guest at Powerline, William Voegeli has his finger on the reason. First, Voegeli quotes New Republic writer Noam Scheiber, who wrote the following in the wake of Hurricane Katrina in 2005:
Noam Scheiber, then and now a writer for The New Republic, rejected such fatalism. The real lesson of Katrina, he insisted, one that justified all the denunciations of George W. Bush and his administration, was "that a robust, efficient government can mitigate, if not completely eliminate, much of the chaos and nastiness in the world." (Emphasis added.)
There's little doubt that President Obama has been trying to make the already gigantic federal government even more robust. Efficiency is another matter. Voegeli makes the point well:
It's not hard to understand why, less than five years after Katrina, Barack Obama's maladroit response to the Gulf oil spill is causing so much agitation among his admirers. Obama was supposed to be the un-W., fluent where his predecessor was tongue-tied, affirming in word and deed that a sufficiently robust and energetic government could rid the world of chaos and nastiness.
The impotence, confusion and cluelessness of the Obama administration's response to the oil spill present liberal America with a painful dilemma. Those who admired and verged on worshiping Obama during 2008 and 2009 have to wonder whether the oil spill is Obama's 3:00 a.m. phone call, and Hillary Clinton's warnings that the kid just wasn't ready to hit big-league pitching have been proven correct.
There's a lot more at the link and it's worth your time.
2 comments:
What a absolute tool! It's obvious that he has tempered his response to the catastrophe to try to slam Cap & Trade down our throats.
Other countries with state of the art technology clean up boats have offered their help, and he won't accept the help. Slow to respond to requests from the states involved. You tell me what he's doing. If mitigating the damage is his top priority, why hasn't he accepted offered help, and why isn't he addressing requests from states?
All the while he continues to blame EVERYTHING on BP while NOTHING is his fault.
The speech was really nothing but a shameless advance press notice for his promotion of cap & trade. If a few birds and other animals have to die, and if a few fisherman lose their houses, so be it. They can sue BP to it's death, and there are bigger issues here.
Clicking on the link has its rewards. One of which is hope that this disaster might convince at least some that the government, even under the control of the One and his Statist fellow believers, is unable to make things right. That doesn't mean government is bad, just that it has limits (and we have transgressed them.)
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