AP: BP misled government about oil spill, now it's Obama's “crisis”
Written by Eric Boehlert
Published
The latest, as the news media continues its clumsy, GOP-friendly attempt to politicize the Louisiana oil spill. And worse, to politicize it in only one direction.
From AP:
Suddenly, everything changed. For days, as an oil spill spread in the Gulf of Mexico, BP assured the government the plume was manageable, not catastrophic. Federal authorities were content to let the company handle the mess while keeping an eye on the operation.
But then government scientists realized the leak was five times larger than they had been led to believe, and days of lulling statistics and reassuring words gave way Thursday to an all-hands-on-deck emergency response. Now questions are sure to be raised about a self-policing system that trusted a commercial operator to take care of its own mishap even as it grew into a menace imperiling Gulf Coast nature and livelihoods from Florida to Texas.
Did you follow that? It appears oil industry giant BP wildly miscalculated the extent of the massive oil spill. So naturally, what does the AP conclude? The spill has become a political crisis for the White House. (Not the oil industry):
The political subtext of the crisis was clear and increasingly on people's minds, whether from a federal office deploying oil-containment booms or from a Louisiana parish awaiting yet another sucker punch from the sea.
Will this be Obama's Katrina?
According to the AP, “people” are wondering if the oil spill will be Obama's Katrina. But after reading the article, in which nobody mentions Katrina, it's clear that by “people,” the AP means the AP.