With the Gulf Coast oil spill appearing to spin out of control, the Obama-loving media are now working overtime to shelter the President from any possible blame.
Exhibit A: New York Times columnist Frank Rich's pathetic piece published Sunday.
Almost incomprehensibly, "Obama's Katrina? Maybe Worse" is more of hit piece on the Bush administration than a serious analysis of the failings of the current White House to do anything to prevent the environmental disaster slamming the Gulf Coast after that oil well exploded almost six weeks ago.
But that's just the beginning, for Rich actually ends up pointing fingers at Dick Cheney, Glenn Beck, Sarah Palin, the Tea Party, and Rand Paul:
Whatever Obama's failings, he is infinitely more competent at coping with catastrophe than his predecessor. President Bush's top disaster managers - the Homeland Security secretary, Michael Chertoff, as well as the notorious "Brownie" - professed ignorance of New Orleans's humanitarian crisis a full day after the nation had started watching it live in real time on television. When Bush finally appeared, he shunned the city entirely and instead made a jocular show of vowing to rebuild the coastal home of his party's former Senate leader, Trent Lott. He never did take charge.
The Obama administration has been engaged with the oil spill from the start - however haltingly and inarticulately at times.
You got that?
No matter WHAT happens, regardless of how much damage is eventually done to the Gulf Coast, Obama is "infinitely more competent at coping with catastrophe than" Bush, and has been "engaged with the oil spill from the start."
Makes you wonder what the color of the sky is in Rich's world.
Alas, he was just getting warmed up:
When Katrina hit, Bush was in his second term and his bumbling was not a shock to a country that had witnessed two-plus years of his grievous mismanagement of the Iraq war. His laissez-faire response to the hurricane was also consistent with his political DNA as a small-government conservative in thrall to big business. [...]
Long before Obama took office, the public was plenty skeptical that government could do anything right. Eight years of epic Bush ineptitude and waste only added to Washington's odor.
From there, Rich even started blaming the Tea Party, Rand Paul, Sarah Palin, and Glenn Beck:
Now Obama is stuck between a rock and a Tea Party. [...]
Paul rightly described his victory as "a message from the Tea Party" that it was on the march "to take our government back." And if he doesn't represent the G.O.P., who does if not his most powerful supporters and ideological fellow travelers, Glenn Beck and Sarah Palin? [...]
The Tea Party is meanwhile busy rewriting America's early history under Beck's tutelage by enforcing a vision of the Constitution tantamount to the Creationists' view of Genesis. We must obey the words of the founding fathers literally - or what the Tea Partiers think those words to be.
So you see, we're now at a point when media elites like Rich are going to blame every bad thing that happens in this country, regardless of who is in the White House and what Party controls Congress, on George W. Bush and conservatives.
Exit question: will this ever end, or could Bush/Beck/Palin/Tea Party/Conservative Derangement Syndrome continue for the foreseeable future?
