Incompetent. Arrogant. Disorganized. Defensive.
Five years ago, when the storm surges of Katrina destroyed the levees of New Orleans, we turned to the Dutch for help. They know a thing or two about holding back water.
They also know a thing or two about deep-water oil drilling. Three days after BP's Deepwater Horizon rig started leaking, they offered to help:
It was willing to provide ships outfitted with oil-skimming booms, and it proposed a plan for building sand barriers to protect sensitive marshlands.The response from the Obama administration and BP, which are coordinating the cleanup: “The embassy got a nice letter from the administration that said, ‘Thanks, but no thanks,'” said Geert Visser, consul general for the Netherlands in Houston.Now, almost seven weeks later, as the oil spewing from the battered well spreads across the Gulf and soils pristine beaches and coastline, BP and our government have reconsidered.U.S. ships are being outfitted this week with four pairs of the skimming booms airlifted from the Netherlands and should be deployed within days. Each pair can process 5 million gallons of water a day, removing 20,000 tons of oil and sludge.At that rate, how much more oil could have been removed from the Gulf during the past month?
Incompetent. Arrogant. Disorganized. Defensive. The country's in the best of hands.
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Jun '10
Re: Incompetent. Arrogant. Disorganized. Defensive.
Something about all of this gives me the impression that the administration thought it could let the spill get just a little bit worse and then they could swoop in and act like heroes... only it backfired.
May '10
Re: Incompetent. Arrogant. Disorganized. Defensive.
Of course they turned it down. We are so busy trying to be seen as charitable to the rest of the world, that we can't be seen receiving help from anyone else. And who better to be at the head of a massive clean-up, than a community organizer!
May '10
Re: Incompetent. Arrogant. Disorganized. Defensive.
The part that jumped out at me was:
Federal law has also hampered the assistance. The Jones Act, the maritime law that requires all goods be carried in U.S. waters by U.S.-flagged ships, has prevented Dutch ships with spill-fighting equipment from entering U.S. coastal areas.
So one reason we couldn't respond properly is a 1920's protectionist statute designed to benefit US Merchant Marine sailors at the expense of shippers and -- as an unintended consequence -- US shipbuilders. I should note, though, that according to the Wikipedia entry, the act can be waived:
Requests for waivers of certain provisions of the act are reviewed by the United States Maritime Administration on a case by case basis. Waivers have been granted for example, in cases of national emergencies or in cases of strategic interest. For instance, declining oil production prompted MARAD to grant a waiver to operators of the 512-foot Chinese vessel Tai An Kou to tow an oil rig from the Gulf of Mexico to Alaska.
Don't we think the White House lawyers knew about this precedent?
May '10
Re: Incompetent. Arrogant. Disorganized. Defensive.
Daniel,
As I started to read your comment, I though to myself, "There is a waiver for everything." This is a time-honored saying in the military, and I thought probably the rest of government as well.
Then I read your second paragraph.....
It is amazing the levels of amateurism deployed on so many fronts by the whole of this administration. Apparently things are not progressing like the administration members argued they would in their graduate school theses.
I guess it might not be a bad idea to have a little real-world experience sprinkled into your administration somewhere....
Re: Incompetent. Arrogant. Disorganized. Defensive.
There is a waiver for everything, I think, except incompetence. Can you imagine the reaction if this had happened under the despised Bush regime? It would have been a six-act play. Daily Show jokes. Calls for resignations. Protest marches. It would be seen as a crystal-clear illustration of What's Awful About Bush.
May '10
Re: Incompetent. Arrogant. Disorganized. Defensive.
Another wrinkle:
"U.S. Interior Secretary Ken Salazar told a Senate hearing he would ask BP to repay the salaries of any workers laid off because of the six-month moratorium on deepwater exploratory drilling imposed by the U.S. government after the spill."
So now the administration is demanding that a British oil company pay our own oil companies compensation for an action that was both unnecessary and made without BP's input. I smell a further souring of relations with London.
Compensation, by the way, will not prevent the rig owners from abandoning their Gulf contracts to do business elsewhere.
Re: Incompetent. Arrogant. Disorganized. Defensive.
Wow. Just when you thought that they couldn't get stupider.
May '10
Re: Incompetent. Arrogant. Disorganized. Defensive.
A lot of this incompetence will see the light of day if BP has the guts and resolve to battle the Administration in court and fight on every front where they are being asked to reimburse expenses which would not have been incurred had the feds done this or that (or not done this or that). For instance, this latest fix, which apparently is working, was proposed by BP much earlier on but was resisted by the Administration because it required a temporary 20% increase in the flow as they cut the pipe. BP's PR can't get much worse, so they might as well go to war in their own defense.
May '10
Re: Incompetent. Arrogant. Disorganized. Defensive.
I did hear speculation in the very early stages of this that the Administration was playing it down and intentionally not mobilizing in an ostentatious way because the climate change bill required an increase in off-shore oil drilling to get certain senators on board, and they feared that media attention on the accident would undermine this compromise and thus doom the bill.
May '10
Re: Incompetent. Arrogant. Disorganized. Defensive.
Daniel, I don't doubt for an instant that President Obama would be constrained by such thinking. He seems to think leadership consists of saying stuff while other people carry out his wishes; so far, his response to the oil spill has consisted of letting everything wind its way through the bureaucracy.
I can't help but think that if he were in a business, he would be one of those mid-level managers who write an email, then call it a day thinking they actually accomplished something.
There are a lot of operational gaps in his response (or lack thereof). I've blogged about a couple of them; The Anchoress has an ongoing series about it.
May '10
Re: Incompetent. Arrogant. Disorganized. Defensive.
After Katrina, the Indian navy reportedly sent a fleet to assist. Their help was turned away, as was much of the aid offered by the international community. Would we level the same criticism at the Bush administration as we are at the Obama administration?
May '10
Re: Incompetent. Arrogant. Disorganized. Defensive.
Byron York made a great observation on the Laura Ingraham show last Friday. He said he went to Chicago and talked to people about Obama's time as a community organizer, and they pointed out that that role consists of mobilizing the community to put pressure on the government to give them stuff. Not organizing the production or delivery of stuff, just pressuring the government to do it.
This is pretty much the model his administration has followed: Identify a third party (BP) who can be made responsible for the problem. (That was pretty easy, since BP did cause the problem.) Then publicly hector them until they solve the problem. Then take credit. Don't do anything yourself to solve the problem, and for goodness' sake don't actually make any decisions for which you could be held responsible.
The key here is that the other guy is always responsible. In Chicago, that was the government. Now he's the government, so he's got to pressure someone else. This is a recipe for turning the US government into the world's most bloated, expensive bystander. Check.
May '10
Re: Incompetent. Arrogant. Disorganized. Defensive.
What I want to know is will this mishandling of the oil leak end Obama's chances of a second term?
May '10
Re: Incompetent. Arrogant. Disorganized. Defensive.
Unlikely: President Obama is extremely talented at getting elected. He will find a way (by the time of his re-election attempt) to either blame the spill on others, claim that he had solved it, or make it be forgotten.
May '10
Re: Incompetent. Arrogant. Disorganized. Defensive.
Harlech: After Katrina, the Indian navy reportedly sent a fleet to assist. Their help was turned away, as was much of the aid offered by the international community. Would we level the same criticism at the Bush administration as we are at the Obama administration? · Jun 9 at 8:24pm
Harlech, did you read the link you embedded? Here's the first line: "According to the European Commission, one week after the disaster, on September 4, 2005, the United States officially asked the European Union for emergency help..." There was no mention of the Indian Navy.
We asked for help, as Rob pointed out in his original post, and got it. We didn't take all of it, especially the cash donations, but it doesn't sound like we eschewed the expertise and specialized equipment of other countries.
Re criticism of Bush:
1. I recall a lot of criticism from the right over Bush and FEMA.
2. The over-the-top misinformation (cannibalism?) promulgated by the MSM produced, it seemed to me, an understandable defensive posture on the part of the right.
3. I didn't think it possible, but the response to the oil spill has made the response to Katrina seem competent.
Re: Incompetent. Arrogant. Disorganized. Defensive.
Well, Harlech, sort of apples and oranges, right? I mean, cleaning up an oil spill is pretty specific work that requires a kind of all-hands approach. As many oil skimming booms as possible. If your basement floods, you want all the wet-vacs you can get, from every neighbor.
I'm not sure that what New Orleans needed, after Katrina, was the Indian navy steaming up the Mississippi. The Bush administration may have made mistakes in its response to Katrina, but I don't think telling the Indian navy to stand down was one of them.
May '10
Re: Incompetent. Arrogant. Disorganized. Defensive.
It (naively) seems to me that that Katrina and the oil spill are quite different in:
1. the nature of the disaster (natural vs. man-caused)
2. the nature of the emergency (human deaths vs. environmental damage)
3. the necessary type of response (saving lives vs. stopping an environmental catastrophe).
The distinction is that the government should be rehearsed enough to solve problems of the Katrina type (save lives during a natural disaster, albeit huge), but clueless when involved with a disaster of the oil spill type (stop the flow of oil caused by mismanaging an unfamiliar part of the world). Nobody knows what to do here, but the president cannot admit that. Bravado, however, won't cut it.
We have felt a part of nature we were not ready for; it happened before Obama was president; but he--in his credulity--believes that he can solve the problem through blaming other people. This is looking more pathetic by the day.
I say nuke it.
May '10
Re: Incompetent. Arrogant. Disorganized. Defensive.
Things occur that Wikipedia does not record. My source on the Indian navy is an extremely well-connected South Asian defense policy expert. As for eschewing the expertise and specialized equipment of other countries, see this report for a comprehensive list of aid offers that we rejected: teams focused on HAZMAT, search and rescue, medical, engineering, water purification, decontamination, etc. In addition, we rejected equipment -- pumps, trucks, helicopters, medicine, etc.
Does this mean it all would've been useful? No. Does this mean national pride should play no role in our decision-making? No. I suspect, however, that if the Obama administration had accepted the Dutch offer, we would be criticizing him for doing so.
Re: Incompetent. Arrogant. Disorganized. Defensive.
Over dinner this evening, my seventeen-year-old son relayed a fanciful story making its rounds through the local high school grapevine: Presidents Obama and Reagan take a Coast Guard cutter to observe the oil leak firsthand. Obama steps up to the teleprompter to deliver a televised speech while Reagan, a diving knife in his teeth, strips to his skivvies, jumps over the side and swims to the bottom, plugging the broken pipe with his socks and returning to the surface before the current president gets to the meaty bit of yet another stern-sounding address.
My faith in the next generation is restored.
Edited on June 10, 2010 at 8:53amMay '10
Re: Incompetent. Arrogant. Disorganized. Defensive.
You could say Reagan kicked the broken pipe's ass.