Liberalism and Spills

Some conservatives are rightly cautioning the right about placing too much blame on the president for the BP spill. After all, accidents do happen, whether on a republican's watch or a democrat's. That said, I think the reason most people on the right are annoyed is that we remember all too clearly how eager, bordering on the obsessive, the left (and Obama) was to link the Katrina aftermath to President Bush. Some even went so far as to suggest that latent racism on the part of Bush was the real explanation for the administration's supposedly lackadaisical response to the hurricane. Anyway, Peggy Noonan makes a good point here. The analogy she offers between the images of the gushing oil from underwater and the out of control spending flowing out of Washington under Obama is particularly salient.

I wonder if the president knows what a disaster this is not only for him but for his political assumptions. His philosophy is that it is appropriate for the federal government to occupy a more burly, significant and powerful place in America—confronting its problems of need, injustice, inequality. But in a way, and inevitably, this is always boiled down to a promise: "Trust us here in Washington, we will prove worthy of your trust." Then the oil spill came and government could not do the job, could not meet need, in fact seemed faraway and incapable: "We pay so much for the government and it can't cap an undersea oil well!"