THE GUARDIAN: We on the left have been in numb denial about President Obama's failures. But as the crises pile up we can't remain silent
Until President Obama's first ever Oval Office address-to-the-nation the other night BP's chief executive Tony Hayward was winning the booby prize as "America's most clueless man" for his gaffe-prone TV interviews. But Obama is gaining fast. His self-exonerating speech, full of sparkling generalities and with no hint of frank accountability for his administration's culpability in the nation's worst environmental disaster, was like the man himself, bloodless and emotionally detached from the human costs of an oil invasion that's now spreading from Louisiana to Texas, Florida and as far north as the Carolinas.
Instead, to cover his impotence to cope with the seemingly unstoppable 60,000 barrel a day spillage, and his deference to BP he's appointing – what else? – one of those tired old wheezes, a "tsar" to oversee the Gulf spill effort and a "commission" to investigate its causes which by now are well known by everyone except the clueless White House. Don't they listen to their own scientific advisers?
Tony Hayward must feel a little relief that the spotlight on him as a 24-karat fool shifted momentarily on Tuesday night to our do-nothing-except-make-war president. But the dogs are waking up and barking in the night.
Until BP's blowout in the Gulf eight weeks ago the American left (what there is of it) trailed poodle-like after Barack Obama, refusing to criticise, let alone, attack "our guy in the White House". We had worked our butts off for his election, and now we were punched out or perhaps felt we had nowhere else to go – and isn't it nice for a change to have a president who can parse a complicated sentence? Any lingering doubts we had were stifled after one scary look at Obama's yowling enemies – racist and crazy about Palin – which was enough to send us whimpering back to our kennels. But like tiny buds of spring little fragile flowers of dissent are springing up all over the place, sometimes unexpectedly. >>> Clancy Sigal | Saturday, June 19, 2010
HT: Always On Watch >>>
