Deepwater Horizon BP oil well

Michael "Heckuva job, Brownie" Brown of FEMA during the Hurricane Katrina clusterf*** in New Orleans, had an interview with MSNBC in which he made the wild, hysterical, unhinged claim that the Obama Administration delayed its response to the blow-out of the Deepwater Horizon oil well owned by British Petroleum (BP). To its credit, MSNBC responded with a good deal of skepticism and questioned his claims.

Fox News also hosted Brown and failed to question any of his claims and so got spanked by the President's Press Secretary Robert Gibbs.

The whole idea that the Obama Administration's response to the BP oil spill compares in any possible way, shape or form to Bush's Katrina response completely falls apart once the facts are known.

The problem with, as Brown puts it, the media showing pictures of Bush playing guitar during Katrina was that it made the whole government response look incompetent. And hey, President Obama didn't go to the Gulf of Mexico until very recently. Problem with this theory though, was that the picture of Bush playing guitar as people in New Orleans drowned was that it very precisely describd exactly what the situation in August 2005 was. Bush's whole government was asleep at the wheel and failed to effectively respond until FAR too many days after the disaster. Obama's government, as one person put it "Scored 100 out of 100 in its' response," which is why the press, try as it might, can't seem to find anyone of any seriousness or credibility to say that Obamas' response was slow or in any way faulty.


Good pieces with extensive details on the crisis. One. Two.

Interesting conspiracy theory on the initial blow-out