Freedom Line Blog

Hypocrisy in a president is shameful enough.  But combining that hypocrisy with outright dishonesty is inexcusable.

Compare a front-page headline from today’s Wall Street Journal versus President Obama’s speech from the Oval Office regarding the Gulf oil spill.  In his June 15 speech, Obama descended into his usual habit of scapegoating the allegedly “deregulatory” Bush administration and falsely attempting to distinguish his own:

Over the last decade, [the federal Minerals Management Service] has become emblematic of a failed philosophy that views all regulation with hostility — a philosophy that says corporations should be allowed to play by their own rules and police themselves…  When Ken Salazar became my Secretary of the Interior, one of his very first acts was to clean up the worst of the corruption at this agency.  But it’s now clear that the problem there ran much deeper, and the pace of reform was just too slow.  And so Secretary Salazar and I are bringing in new leadership at the agency…  So one of the lessons we’ve learned from this spill is that we need better regulations, better safety standards, and better enforcement when it comes to offshore drilling.  But a larger lesson is that no matter how much we improve our regulation of the industry, drilling for oil these days entails greater risk.”

But that’s not true.  According to a front-page report from today’s Wall Street Journal entitled “Obama Decried, Then Used, Some Bush Drilling Policies,” the Obama White House urged a federal court of appeals to reverse its environmental risk analysis and allow Gulf oil drilling to proceed:

Less than four months after President Barack Obama took office, his new administration received a forceful warning about the dangers of offshore drilling.  The alarm was rung by a federal appeals court in Washington, D.C., which found that the government was unprepared for a major spill at sea…  Despite its pro-environment pledges, the Obama administration urged the court to revisit the decision.”

The appellate court did reverse its previous ruling, allowing more Gulf drilling to proceed.  That includes BP’s well.

Obama’s halting leadership style sows economic uncertainty at home and international menace abroad.  His increasing dishonesty, however, creates an even more disturbing spectre haunting the nation.