Obama's oil spill response: Too much culpability, too much passivity

By Dana Milbank
WashPost
Sunday, May 30, 2010;

For eight years we had a president who refused to accept blame. Now we have one who seems to enjoy it.

In the hour President Obama spent at the podium in the East Room this week holding a news conference on the Gulf oil spill, he practiced every form of self-flagellation short of bringing out a cat-o'-nine-tails.

"The culture had not fully changed in MMS" -- the agency that polices oil drilling -- "and absolutely I take responsibility for that," he said. "There wasn't sufficient urgency."

The administration, he explained, "was in the process of making these reforms. But the point that I'm making is that obviously they weren't happening fast enough. If they had been happening fast enough, this might have been caught."

He decorated the East Room with wuddas, cuddas and shuddas: "We should have busted through those constraints. . . . pre-deploying boom would have been the right thing to do . . . I do think our efforts fell short. . . . They should have pushed them sooner. . . . I think that it took too long. . . . Where I was wrong was in my belief that the oil companies had their act together."

(More here.)