The administration is in a terrible bind when it comes to the gulf oil spill.  They are being accused of either gross incompetence, or intentionally letting this disaster grow worse in order to push an environmental agenda.  I can’t see any president wanting either to stick.  But, that’s the political quicksand in which they are mired.  They’re trying to distract from it-attempting to let the story die down, but millions of gallons of oil gushing into the gulf is hard to ignore.  They’ve tried to blame BP (their full complicity will be investigated in the future).  They’ve gone to the old standard of blaming Bush/Cheney.  It all seems to be failing.  The blame game is getting old, and the people are starting to see through it.

Gateway Pundit has compiled a short list of the administrations actions, or lack thereof.

** The feds only accepted assistance from 5 of 28 countries.
** It took the Obama Administration 53 days to accept help from the Dutch and British.
** It took them 58 days to mobilize the US military to the Gulf.
** The feds shut down crude-sucking barges due to fire extinguisher concerns.
** The Obama Administration ignore oil boom manufacturers that have miles of product stockpiled in their warehouses.
** They only have moved 31 of 2,000 oil skimmers to the disaster area off of Florida.
** Florida hired an additional 5 skimmer boats to operate off its coast due to federal inaction.
** There are no skimmer boats off the coast of Mississippi.
** The massive A-Boat skimmer won’t be allowed to join the cleanup effort until the Coast Guard and the EPA figure out whether it meets their standards.
** The feds shut down sand berm dredging off the Louisiana coast.
** The president continues to hit the golf course, ball games, hold BBQ’s and party while the crude oil washes up on shore.

If you took any one of these individually, it would be easy to say that it’s incompetence.  This is a big government response, and big government is inefficient and unresponsive by virtue of the fact that it’s a giant bureaucracy.  However, when you look at all of them, a pattern of obstruction emerges.  I have a difficult time believing that all of this obstruction is not intentional.  There are simply too many incidents of federal authorities actively preventing the spill from being contained or cleaned up to be written off as pure incompetence or chance.   As the saying goes,  “…if it looks like a duck and quacks like a duck…”

Additionally, this matches the Democrat/”progressive” standard of either creating or exploiting a crisis.  We’ve heard that the words of Rahm Emanuel.  We also heard that from Senator Kyl when he discussed securing the border (while that was denied by the administration, audio from Obama’s time as a Senator shows that he stated it himself several years ago).  Basically, using a crisis to forward a political agenda is part of this administration’s “toolbox.”

I could be wrong, but if I am, this is the single most incompetent administration in our history.   Either way, it is terrible news for the POTUS, and a direct indictment of big government.

Cross-posted at the Conservative Hideout 2.0