Rolling Stone: Obama Screwing Up, But Oil Spill Is Bush's Fault

I must admit, my heart leapt for a few seconds when I saw Drudge's headline touting a Rolling Stone expose' on President Obama's mishandling of the BP oil disaster: COULD IT BE? The Liberal music mag that breathlessly covered their un-vetted Superman's ascension to power is now turning on him?

My enthusiasm was quickly curbed when reading the headline, however: "The Spill, The Scandal and the President: The inside story of how Obama failed to crack down on the corruption of the Bush years – and let the world's most dangerous oil company get away with murder".

As the first part of the headline suggests, the opening paragraphs do level some pretty wicked burns against Team Obama's response to the spill, this in the days before it became known as the worst ecological disaster in American history. However, writer Tim Dickenson's main point is, no matter what's currently happening, no matter there's the equivalent of 3 Exxon Valdez spills dumping into the Gulf EVERY FIVE DAYS, whatever happens: it was Bush's fault -- oh, and so was 9/11:

"Like the attacks by Al Qaeda," Dickenson writes, "the disaster in the Gulf was preceded by ample warnings – yet the administration had ignored them. "

With the stage safely set that whatever you're about to read is the fault of the "Texas oil men who preceded [Obama] in office", Dickenson lets fly some pretty big haymakers against key Obama players -- that the oil spill was initially estimated to be gushing up to 100,000 barrels of oil a day into the Gulf -- and that the Obama Administration had publicly said just a fraction of that -- 1,000 barrels -- was escaping the pipeline which was smashed after a deadly explosion.

Obama's Interior Secretary Ken Salazar bears most of the brunt of the criticism, as if Rolling Stone's editors can't point their weed-stained fingers completely at Chairman O, except to say his greatest sin wasn't reversing everything that Bush did in while in office.

An Obama critic, however, would have a different view of this disaster, and of Obama's leadership in this crisis. Take this snippet, for example, on Obama's schedule days after the gusher began: "The president himself was occupied elsewhere. After returning from his vacation, Obama spent Monday, April 26th palling around with Derek Jeter and the New York Yankees, congratulating them on their World Series victory. He later took time to chat with the president of Honduras. When he put in a call to Gov. Haley Barbour of Mississippi, it was to talk about tornadoes that had caused damage in that state, with only a brief mention of the oil spill. On Tuesday the 27th, Obama visited a wind-turbine plant in Iowa. Wednesday the 28th, he toured a biofuels refinery in Missouri and talked up financial reform in Quincy, Illinois. He didn't mention the oil spill or the Gulf."

Hmph.