Grandma Homa adage “say something often enough and people will start believing it.”
Well, President Obama has proven beyond a shadow of a doubt that American people will believe absolutely anything if it’s said often enough. Think “not one single dime” or “on C-Span” …
For the record, I’m not on the ‘slow response’ bandwagon — I wasn’t on Bush for Katrina — and to be consistent — I can’t jump on Obama for the oil spill.
But, I am amused by the Administration’s rapid response to re-write history.
Even the NY Times has turned on Obama : “It took the administration more than a week to really get moving. The timetable is damning.”
The Administration’s response? A downright laughable media blitz with the talking point mantra — “from day one” — that’s being parroted ad nauseam by administration lackies so of often that it’s becoming a parody of “on message”.
Click the pic to see it for yourself:
I expect “from day one” will become part everyday jargon now … and proof positive that if you say something often enough, people will believe it.
Grandma Homa had it right on that one.
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Excerpted from NY Times: Unanswered Questions on the Spill, April 30, 2010
President Obama has ordered a freeze on new offshore drilling leases as well as a “thorough review” into what is almost sure to be the worst oil spill in this country’s history — exceeding in size and environmental damage the calamitous Exxon Valdez disaster in 1989.The company, BP, seems to have been slow to ask for help.
Yet the administration should not have waited, and should have intervened much more quickly on its own initiative.
A White House as politically attuned as this one should have been conscious of two obvious historical lessons. One was the Exxon Valdez, where a late and lame response by both industry and the federal government all but destroyed one of the country’s richest fishing grounds and ended up costing billions of dollars. The other was President George W. Bush’s hapless response to Hurricane Katrina.
Now we have another disaster in more or less the same neck of the woods, and it takes the administration more than a week to really get moving.
The timetable is damning. The blowout occurred on April 20. In short order, fire broke out on the rig, taking 11 lives, the rig collapsed and oil began leaking at a rate of 40,000 gallons a day. BP tried but failed to plug the well. Even so, BP appears to have remained confident that it could handle the situation with private resources (as did the administration) until Wednesday night, when, at a hastily called news conference, the Coast Guard quintupled its estimate of the leak to 5,000 barrels, or more than 200,000 gallons a day.
Only then did the administration move into high gear … with a series of media events designed to convey urgency — including a Rose Garden appearance by the president and dispatching of every cabinet officer with the remotest interest in the disaster to a command center in Louisiana.
We now face a huge disaster whose consequences might have been minimized with swifter action.
