Witness how effortlessly he fields this relatively probing question from Obama fan and Mediaite correspondent Tommy Christopher:
“You gotta have a license to drive a car in this country, but regrettably, you can get on a TV show and say virtually anything. That’s my job!”
I might have made up that last part, but let’s call it fake but accurate. If this sounds suspiciously like Ari Fleischer’s much-maligned warning to Americans, in the immediate wake of 9/11, to “watch what they do and what they say,” that’s only because you can remember things. Fleischer’s statement brought cries of outrage from the media rather than good-natured chuckles, possibly because he worked for a Republican.
Allahpundit puts it best:
Well, look on the bright side: If nothing else good comes from this disaster, at least now we have a roughly quantifiable sense of how long it takes for media outrage to build towards Obama versus towards Bush. Figure Dubya would have been under fire for dragging his feet on the spill after, what — maybe three days? It’s now 34 days since BP’s rig exploded and only yesterday did frustration really start bubbling on the Sunday chat shows.
Yep. Although, in defense of the Obama administration, I do think it’s unfair to speculate that they’ve been slow to respond to this unprecedented disaster due to some sort of corruption. Based on all available evidence over the past 16 months, a much more likely explanation is that they’re simply a pack of bungling incompetents.