The Buck stops...

Victor Davis Hanson on petards and hoisting:

The president last night addressed the nation on the oil slick, nearly two months into the disaster. He seems stunned that a single man in Washington is being held responsible for either a human error that is polluting the gulf, or an act of god that led to a tragic chain of events, inevitable at some point when drilling from 5,000 feet above the ocean floor.

Do not we see the injustice of it all, of holding a green Mr. Obama culpable for either the blowout or the tardy and insufficient efforts at clean-up? Does Obama appoint another “czar?” Does he do to BP what he did to Las Vegas, the saw-happy surgeons, Rush Limbaugh and Fox News? Is the spill to oil companies what the 2008 panic was to GM? Is there some sort of cash-for-clunkers PR fix? A Bush memo to be found ordering drilling from a zillion feet? Perhaps another “wise Latina,” or an “Oooh. Van Jones, alright! So, Van Jones” to recruit?

What to do? Where to turn? Whom to blame? Who unfairly established this strange post-Katrina precedent that the president of all people — not the mayor, not the governor, not private enterprise — is ultimately responsible?

We can all question that unfair premise, and did so in 2005, but critics like Obama himself made the federal response to Katrina a campaign issue. And so here we are with him hoisted with his own petard.

That old meany goddess Nemesis is at work again, causing havoc nearly in the identical spot as Katrina (but of course)— focusing on the young technocrat who so loudly blamed the “incompetence” of Bush during the New Orleans mess. Now our Oedipus is reduced to raging in his halls against BP, with thousands of hard-working Louisianans and other Gulfers the losers for this divine reminder about the wages of hubris.

Given the dearth of Obama’s executive experience, and given what we know of community organizing, and in light of what we saw in the 2008 campaign, the president is pretty much acting to script. Readers, you know it well by now and saw it again last night.

The rest here. The best line of the piece:

Right now we are being governed by a GS something, who has no idea where money comes from, but lots of ideas how to blow it.