Friday various & sundry

Michelle Malkin on our strangely disengaged president:

“I am angry and frustrated,” he heaved. Rather unconvincingly. He was “singularly focused,” he asserted. Rather distractedly. The president did manage to work up enough energy to condemn BP and then turned to a moment of obligatory self-aggrandizement: “I’m confident that people are going to look back and say that this administration was on top of what was an unprecedented crisis.” [. . .]

Then, addressing all the ignorant Americans who have failed to appreciate his rescue efforts, Obama mustered up a semblance of indignation: “Those who think we were either slow in our response or lacked urgency don’t know the facts. This has been our highest priority since this crisis occurred.”

And this is the Obama definition of accountability: blaming everyone else for lacking the Ivy League–honed comprehension skills to see the greatness of his fortitude and foresight.

How high of a priority did his administration really make the post-spill cleanup? After droning on haltingly about the federal failure to form an “oil . . . tracking . . . flow . . . group,” Obama admitted with a shrug: “There was a lag of several weeks that shouldn’t have happened.”

Read the rest.

Jim Geraghty's summary of Obama's stance toward the crisis: We’re In Control, I Just Don’t Know What We’re Doing. Just relax, all you folks in voter-land. The oil spill is one of his tippity-top top priorities.

Krauthammer on who else might be to blame:

There will always be catastrophic oil spills. You make them as rare as humanly possible, but where would you rather have one: in the Gulf of Mexico, upon which thousands depend for their livelihood, or in the Arctic, where there are practically no people? All spills seriously damage wildlife. That's a given. But why have we pushed the drilling from the barren to the populated, from the remote wilderness to a center of fishing, shipping, tourism and recreation?

Not that the environmentalists are the only ones to blame. Not by far. But it is odd that they've escaped any mention at all.

RTR.

On the economy, Mark Steyn:

Back in 2008, when I was fulminating against multiculturalism on a more or less weekly basis, a reader wrote to advise me to lighten up, on the grounds that “we’re rich enough to afford to be stupid.”

Two years later, we’re a lot less rich. In fact, many Western nations are, in any objective sense, insolvent. Hence last week’s column, on the EU’s decision to toss a trillion dollars into the great sucking maw of Greece’s public-sector kleptocracy. It no longer matters whether you’re intellectually in favour of European-style social democracy: simply as a practical matter, it’s unaffordable.

He sounds kinda like that mean Chris Christie: "Unlike the United States of America, the state of New Jersey can't just print money."

But Hillary thinks she knows where to find more:

'The rich are not paying their fair share'

If this is her idea of a winning strategy for 2012 she might want to think again. With a redistributor par excellence in the Oval office, we're on to that one.


I saved the very best for last:
White House Jester Beheaded For Making Fun Of Soaring National Debt
h/t: Hot Air


Note to readers: I'm going to be busy for the next couple of days and have invited a few excellent guest bloggers to fill in here. Enjoy, and have a great weekend.

Most recent posts here.