Obama Delay Obscured By Gibbs

Roger Gibbs used the White House Press room as the perfect place to bushwack the US public over the delay in responding to the BP oil rig leak in the Gulf of Mexico. He did so by attacking the Fox news reporter present and claiming that there was no way any factual statement that he offered would reverse the claim made on Fox by former FEMA Director Michael Brown that the Obama adminsitrtion had instigated the oil rig leak.

Of course, Mr. Brown never claimed that the Obama administration was responsible for the oil rig leak. He claimed that the disaster itself was to the liking of the Obama administration, and that the administration were likely to find it useful. Now surely that should not be a surprising line of thought, as White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel is renown for his quip


“You never want a serious crisis to go to waste — and what I mean by that is an opportunity to do things that you didn’t think you could do before.”


which he offered forth at the start of the financial market crisis in 2008.

But I have to admire the audacity of Gibbs, by singling out his only enemy in the room, taking the right on the money comments of Mr. Brown and twisting them to suggest that he had claimed on Fox that the White House had instigated the oil platform accident, suggesting that Fox news did not challenge this assertion, and moving the focus of the story away from the possibly politically motivated tardiness in the administrations response.

Well, Gibbs is right in that Fox interviewer Neil Cavuto did not challenge that particular assertion. That, of course, is because Mr. Brown never made that assertion.

The rig is pumping out two hundred thousand gallons of oil into the bay a day, and its nine days before the Environmental Protection Agency thinks its an issue worth thinking about, and the story from Mr. Gibbs is that Fox is not fair in their reporting.

Hmm.