The GOP rushed to brand the Gulf Coast disaster "Obama's Katrina." But new reports make clear the Bush administration's lax attitude toward regulation deserves much of the blame.
Ever since the great oil price spike of 2008, conservatives have been riding a tide of pro-drilling sentiment to shore up their message on energy issues. Environmentalists had done a decent job in earlier years of framing their concerns about fossil-fuel use in part in terms of energy "independence" and "security," rhetoric that was turned on its head by efforts like Newt Gingrich's "Drill Here, Drill Now, Pay Less" slogan.
The push was so successful that the Obama administration somewhat reluctantly came around to the pro-drilling viewpoint, just in time for the largest oil spill in human history to hit the Gulf of Mexico—pushing public support for drilling down for the first time in years.
This left the hard-core drillers of the right like Gingrich and Karl Rove to grasp for the argument that the spill is somehow "Obama's Katrina"—a charge so absurd that even Fox News hosts won't buy it. Meanwhile, new revelations in Friday's New York Times reveal that something closer to the reverse is the truth—the Deepwater Horizon fiasco is yet another consequence of George W. Bush's corruption and incompetence.