I’ve previously written that blaming President Obama for the Deepwater Horizon catastrophe was largely unfair. The administration did have a small role in the disaster, such as the failure of the Materials Management Service to carry out effective oversight, but who really expects the president to pay attention to an unknown Interior Department agency when there’s serious business to be done like nationalizing health care and plundering our economy. (Indeed, in other industries the MMS’s attitude would have been appropriate.) Obama, I said, is suffering mainly because he over-promised what his government could do.
But recent news has forced me to re-evaluate that assessment. We recently learned that the administration refused assistance from twelve countries (some, such as the Netherlands, with relevant expertise and equipment), and we learned that a Maine company has miles of oil boom sitting idle in its warehouses. And now there are three more stories that paint the administration’s response in a very bad light:
- Local officials are complaining the federal government is actively obstructing their effects to clean up the oil spill. For example, they are making it hard for people to volunteer, are nixing promising cleanup strategies, and won’t even return the locals’ phone calls. (Via the Foundry.)
- They are blocking media access to the oil spill.
- Most troublingly, they have reportedly pressured scientists into retracting estimates of the spill that are more alarming that the official estimates:
But rather than applying such skepticism to BP’s math, the Obama administration has instead attacked scientists who released independent estimates of the spill. When one scientist funded by NOAA released a figure much higher than the government’s estimate, he found himself being pressured to retract it by officials at the agency. “Are you sure you want to keep saying this?” they badgered him. Lubchenco, the head of NOAA, even denounced as “misleading” and “premature” reports that scientists aboard the research vessel Pelican had discovered a massive subsea oil plume. Speaking to PBS, she offered a bizarre denial of the obvious. “It’s clear that there is something at depth,” she said, “but we don’t even know that it’s oil yet.”
Scientists were stunned that NOAA, an agency widely respected for its scientific integrity, appeared to have been co-opted by the White House spin machine. “NOAA has actively pushed back on every fact that has ever come out,” says one ocean scientist who works with the agency. “They’re denying until the facts are so overwhelming, they finally come out and issue an admittance.”
(Via JustOneMinute.) That last story is from Rolling Stone, so take it with several grains of salt, but it’s confirmed by a story in the Houston Chronicle.
These stories paint a picture of the federal government at its worst: insisting on command of the situation without the competence to use that command effectively, suppressing dissent, and obstructing the media from reporting what it is doing.
Internet Scofflaw 