The longer we suffer under this President, the more I am impressed by the depth of his obtusiveness and by how obnoxiously he whines.

Consider this, from FoxNews.com today:

“I think it’s fair to say, if six months ago, before this spill had happened, I had gone up to Congress and I had said we need to crack down a lot harder on oil companies and we need to spend more money on technology to respond in case of a catastrophic spill, there are folks up there, who will not be named, who would have said this is classic, big-government overregulation and wasteful spending,” he told Politico in an interview.Obama also suggested the criticism coming from anti-big government protesters, such as Tea Party activists, was hypocritical.

“Some of the same folks who have been hollering and saying ‘do something’ are the same folks who, just two or three months ago, were suggesting that government needs to stop doing so much,” Obama said. “Some of the same people who are saying the president needs to show leadership and solve this problem are some of the same folks, who just a few months ago, were saying this guy is trying to engineer a takeover of our society through the federal government that is going to restrict our freedoms.”

Mr. President, your attempt to blame conservatives and Tea Partiers for your failings will not wash. Here’s why:

• The taxpayers already send the federal government you run far more than enough money to have all the equipment that technology can make available, and Congress gave you a lot of extra money on top of that in the stimulus to spend what we were told was for “shovel-ready” projects. It’s hard to see anything more shovel-ready than the Gulf right now. If you didn’t spend the money on shovels, it is YOUR fault.

• YOUR Administration accepted BP’s plan for the Deepwater Horizon well AND DIDN’T READ IT.From Rolling Stone:
  

  Nowhere was the absurdity of the policy more evident than in the application that BP submitted for its Deepwater Horizon well only two months after Obama took office. BP claims that a spill is “unlikely” and states that it anticipates “no adverse impacts” to endangered wildlife or fisheries. Should a spill occur, it says, “no significant adverse impacts are expected” for the region’s beaches, wetlands and coastal nesting birds. The company, noting that such elements are “not required” as part of the application, contains no scenario for a potential blowout, and no site-specific plan to respond to a spill. Instead, it cites an Oil Spill Response Plan that it had prepared for the entire Gulf region. Among the sensitive species BP anticipates protecting in the semitropical Gulf? “Walruses” and other cold-water mammals, including sea otters and sea lions. The mistake appears to be the result of a sloppy cut-and-paste job from BP’s drilling plans for the Arctic. Even worse: Among the “primary equipment providers” for “rapid deployment of spill response resources,” BP inexplicably provides the Web address of a Japanese home-shopping network. Such glaring errors expose the 582-page response “plan” as nothing more than a paperwork exercise. “It was clear that nobody read it,” says Ruch, who represents government scientists.”This response plan is not worth the paper it is written on,” said Rick Steiner, a retired professor of marine science at the University of Alaska who helped lead the scientific response to the Valdez disaster. “Incredibly, this voluminous document never once discusses how to stop a deepwater blowout.”

  Maybe you blame Tea Partiers for not bothering to read BP’s application? Or maybe that’s YOUR ADMINISTRATION’S FAULT?I’m not saying a thorough evaluation of the application would have stopped the leak, but the sloppiness of the application might have tipped someone off to the possibility that other sloppiness was going on in time to save the lives of the workers on the platform and stop the leak. The one thing we can be sure of is that it wasn’t the Tea Partiers’ fault your staff didn’t do its job. And it’s not as if you didn’t know the risk, because you personally blamed Bush — before this application was submitted, and well before the leak — for not handling applications strictly enough.

• Except for the libertarians, most of your limited-government critics have no problem spending federal dollars to inspect offshore oil drilling platforms and protect our coastlines (and yes, our borders). It’s you, Mr. President, who wastes our money on cronies, leftists and labor unions while throwing the baby pelicans out with the Gulf water. You wonder why we don’t want the socialized medicine of ObamaCare? It’s not because we want to defund the Minerals Management Service, its because we don’t want to be doctored by the same government that lets BP claim walruses live in the Gulf of Mexico. Maybe if you got the running of government right for once (or even showed as much interest in trying as you do in the comedy stylings of Paul McCartney), you wouldn’t receive so much opposition for expanding it.

In a Zogby Survey Daniel B. Klein and Zeljka Buturovic wrote about in Econ Journal Watch, and Klein in the Wall Street Journal, six groups of people, those very conservative, those libertarian, those conservative, those moderate, those liberal and those progressive/very liberal were asked eight basic economics question so simple, a person of moderate intellect could figure out the correct answers with but a moment’s contemplation. Nevertheless, those who called themselves progressives/very liberal averaged 5.26 wrong answers out of 8, a score that has to rank about the level of blithering idiot. Those who merely called themselves liberal averaged 4.69 wrong answers out of eight. Every other group scored better (“very conservative” scoring best at 1.3 average wrong answers, which is no surprise to me).

Mr. President, you are a man of the left, and you staffed your Administration with leftists. Look to that fact, and not to conservatives and Tea Partiers, as the source of your problems.