Obama was criticized today by the National Commission on the BP Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill and Offshore Drilling for a destructive  “sense of over optimism” regarding his response to the BP oil spill.

Hey, wait , wait! Let’s not jump to conclusions here about this.  Everyone just calm down before you launch into a bash Obama therapy session.  Let’s give him a chance and look at this positively. 

The Wall Street Journal goes on to say that the Administration’s outlook on the crisis “may have affected the scale and speed with which national resources were brought to bear.”

Ok…was I a little too optimistic there?  I tried it out as an exercise just to see the logic behind the thought process.  It actually makes you feel kind of good about yourself….except, I guess its not really comparable since Obama’s over optimism sort of caused millions of people to lose their livelihoods.

But, ok, when over-optimism fails to make you feel good about yourself, I actually found out there’s another defense mechanism you can use to counteract it.  It’s called overreaction:

While Coast Guard personnel told the commission in interviews that they had enough equipment by the end of May, the president announced around that same time that he would triple the federal manpower responding to the spill.

Oh, ok, right so once he realizes he’s wrong he just overcompensates for his own inadequacies as the leader of our country by spending unnecessary resources on the situation.  Resources, which by the way, we don’t actually have.  Because we’re trillions of dollars in debt. Right. 

Let’s go through some of the more heinous sins of omission by the Obama Administration as described by the report.  Bear in mind, this material is pretty ugly so you might want to have something smashable near.

The papers fault the administration for taking “an overly casual approach” in calculating, during the spill’s second week, that between 1,000 and 5,000 barrels of oil were flowing into the Gulf.

Overly casual. Hm. Ok. Well, that estimate must have had some basis, right? Well, it did, and it was a scientific source.  Unfortunately, this is what you really don’t want to hear, according to a White House staff paper:

Despite the acknowledged inaccuracies of the [government] scientist’s estimate and despite the existence of other and potentially better methodologies for visually assessing flow rate…5,000 bbls/day was to remain the government’s official flow-rate estimate for a full month until May 27, 2010.

I’m starting to think maybe this over-optimism thing isn’t really such a healthy way to cope.  I mean I guess it makes since if you’re in denial about reality, but if the President of the United States isn’t willing to accept reality…..fill in the blank.

The paper adds that it is “possible that inaccurate flow-rate figures may have hindered the subsea efforts to stop and to contain the flow of oil at the wellhead.”

Yeah.  Because, by the way, the government changed their tune on the seepage estimates to between 35,000 and 60,000 barrels.  That’s a little bit more than the 5,000 flawed logic suggested to them. I wrote a piece on the lack of transparency regarding oil spill research yesterday.  It seems as though my concerns had some support:

The commission staff also takes the administration to task for having characterized a federal report on the fate of oil in the Gulf as having been subjected to “peer review” by independent scientists.

In fact, the commission staff paper says, it is unclear whether any independent scientists actually reviewed the paper prior to its release in August.

The paper said that about three-quarters of the oil spilled by the well had broken down or been cleaned up. Those estimates have been challenged as overly rosy by some independent scientists.

Overly rosy.  Well, hey, as long as its in the name of “over optimism” it’s all good right?  Seems like transparency might have helped out a little bit had those independent scientists really been given a chance to review the information. But, no, let’s just give some underestimations about the aftereffects of the spill.  That way it’ll come back to bite Louisiana industry for years to come.  That’s mature.

 And then there’s this, which just about sums up the Obama presidency:

 Together, the inaccurate statements created the impression the government “was either not fully competent to handle the spill or not fully candid” about the accident.

The Obama Administration has never been even a little bit competent, let alone fully competent.They’ve lied to the American people throughout the entire past two years about their “effective” stimulus and health care reform legislation. And now there’s this report, showing that the Administration essentially ran from reality when faced with the most devastating disaster this country has seen since Katrina.

Not only is this embarrassing to Obama, but  quite frankly, everyone should be embarrassed about the state of our country and the borderline insanity that pervades our state leadership.  That’s who we elected to be our President.  A guy who ran a Presidential campaign on “hope and change,” but had neither the competency nor the mental fortitude to serve this country in a way that provided either standard to his citizens.  A man who has consistently deceived his citizens and then leaves them hanging out to dry when they are in their greatest time of need.  Thank you, Barack Obama for ruining our country.