Pumped On Their Own Petard

The new normal for Mississippi catfish. 

History rarely provides an event that repudiates both an ideology and the ideologues that evangelize it.  The BP gulf oil leak is precisely that rarest of events.

Our readers will undoubtedly recall the Labor/socialist/Democrat response to Hurricane Katrina.  George W. Bush was blamed, quite literally, for the hurricane itself  (based on his opposition to the Kyoto global warming treaty) and every deficient aspect of every government (municipal, county, state and federal) response thereto.  This memory is hardly subjective-type the words "Bush" and "Katrina" into a Bing or Yahoo search engine and read the first ten websites.

While W was blamed with the most personal and vicious of attacks for every deficient aspect of any government's response to Katrina by the L/S/Ds the same L/S/Ds are utterly silent in the face of the federal government's much slower and even less efficacious response to the BP gulf oil blowout.  The feds had more time to prepare a response to the current disaster and a far more responsible and effective Louisiana this time around than was ever provided by the onrush of Katrina.  The individual federal officials, like Secretaries Salazar and Napolitano, have underperformed the federal bureaucrats who certainly had a less than outstanding response to Katrina.

Hardly a word of criticism of the One and the Singlets who work for him has been heard amongst the denizens of liberal thought.  How often does history provide such a stark indictment of the intellectual honesty and political morality of almost an entire political class?  Not often I daresay.

More significantly, does not the BP oil leak catastrophe demonstrate the very real limitations of federal competence?  Just as the federal bureaucrats who implement disaster plans (not the political leadership that appoints them) failed in their response to Katrina they have failed yet again in the response to the BP oil leak.  Even with the benefit of after action analysis of the bureaucratic clots that clog the federal response to anything, even with the benefit of the brilliance of President Obama, the federal government again demonstrated itself unable to tackle a big tactical crisis. 

The entire corpus of L/S/D ideology is premised on the superiority, if not infallibility, of the federal ability deliver goods and services to the American people.   Ultimately, the BP oil spill demonstrates the inherent weakness of the federal government to solve problems, including those problems that only the federal government is realistically equipped to solve.  Even with the most committed liberal progressives in complete control of government it failed and is demonstrating more failure on a daily, really hourly, basis.  What could provide better empirical evidence of the failure of the big government model even where big government is necessary?

If the federal government cannot manage the production of oil, regulated for over a century, and the deliver of disaster prevention and relief, federally controlled since the great San Francisco earthquake in 1906, why would any rational thinker believe the feds could efficiently deliver health care or energy rationing?