Curmudgeon's Corner

Morning After Pill

Posted by Al Campbell on June 16, 2010

Economy, Political, Quality of Life, U.S.

If there were a morning after pill that Presidents could take following a speech that drew negative comments from both liberal and conservative pundits, President Obama would be picking up the glass of water and the pill this morning.  He might even take two of those magic pills just to be sure he ridded himself of the stigma.

President Obama set a high bar for himself with this first speech from the Oval Office and he failed to deliver to the expectations of even the most ardent supporters in the liberal press.  They were almost uniformly dismayed, and openly discussed their dismay.  We are so accustomed to his speeches at this point, that even the Oval Office setting was insufficient to carry the day.

This has become worse for President Obama than Katrina was for then-President Bush.  Even the people of Louisiana rate Bush higher on Katrina than they now rate Obama on the spill.

Presidents tend not to be too humble or even capable of much humility.  This President could’ve made himself seem more human by displaying his honesty that our government has no better ideas than does BP about how to control this disaster.  If it did, it would be about getting the disaster under control.  It is only about assigning blame to anything and anyone other then members of government.

There has been a major shift over the past few weeks.  There were the guarded assessments that hinted at some unrest amongst the ardent supporters.  Then there were the unkind references to former-President Carter.  Now there is a real groundswell amongst the liberal talking heads.  None of this can be seen as good by this White House…by this Administration.

What now?  There is the meeting today with BP representatives.  There will be the posturing about BP posting a fund of some amount from which claims will be paid by “a third party” since there are complaints of BP “slow walking” the process on its own.  Government oversight will be insisted upon, and BP probably will acquiesce given their horrible PR to this point.  Nothing much will change, however.  The spill is what it is at this point.

Our federal government has pointedly refused to consider private sector solutions that we have now seen as being practical from various television shows where we’ve seen the demonstrations.  Our government’s experts have demonstrated they know very little of a ‘real world’ nature.  The state governors were rebuffed in their efforts for things as simple as using sand buffers to keep the oil off the beaches.  The archaic law that forbids foreign-crewed ships wasn't removed by Presidential edict so Dutch-crewed ships to provide assitance with dikes couldn't be brought in.

This is a bad situation made worse by government diddling and ‘speechifying’.  And this example of government’s ineptitude threatens to undermine anything and everything it attempts to do in forthcoming weeks and months.  Some will applaud that, but we all should feel threatened should something even bigger hit us in this period of disillusionment with our elected government.