If there?s incompetence in government, it?s a pretty sure bet that TIME?s Joe Klein will try to find a way to return to one of his favorite passtimes: bashing Bush. He does it again with his latest column:
Sean Hannity called the spill “Obama’s Katrina,” but it was actually George W. Bush’s second Katrina. Vice President Dick Cheney, fresh from his days at Halliburton, had presided over the weakening of drilling regulations, including the exclusion of remote-shut-off switches (commonly used in the North Sea oil fields), which might have prevented the disaster. The Bush Administration’s petro-bias and antigovernment sensibility soiled the Minerals Management Service (MMS), the agency charged with regulating offshore drilling.
Setting aside for now both Klein?s willful ignorance of pre-Bush government incompetence and his laughable assertion that the big-spending 43rd president had an ?antigovernment sensibility,? it will be interesting to see how long the columnist will try to get away with blaming the previous president for the failures of the current administration.
