American Solutions has the answer.

This is the form letter American Solutions provides:

To: Rahm Emanuel
Chief of Staff to President Obama

PS: How about an Ambassadorship? I didn’t donate any money to the campaign, but I love foreign travel.

Michael Ramirez

Anne Applebaum points out just how ridiculous Obama looks, as he plays King Canute and tries ordering the oil to stop flowing.

Here is the hard truth: The U.S. government does not possess a secret method for capping oil leaks. Even the combined wisdom of the Obama inner circle—all those Harvard economists, silver-tongued spin doctors, and hardened politicos—cannot prevent tens of thousands of tons of oil from pouring out of a hole a mile beneath the ocean’s surface. Other than proximity to the Louisiana coast, this catastrophe therefore has nothing whatsoever in common with Hurricane Katrina. That was an unstoppable natural disaster that turned into a human tragedy thanks to an inadequate government response. This is just an unstoppable disaster, period. It will be a human tragedy precisely because no government response is possible.

Which leads me to mystery: Given that he cannot stop the oil from flowing, why has President Barack Obama decided to act as if he can? And given that he is totally reliant on BP to save the fish and the birds of the Gulf of Mexico, why has he started pretending otherwise—why, in his own words, is he looking for someone’s “ass to kick”? I am guessing that there are many reasons for this recent change of rhetorical tone and that some of them are ideological. Of course, this is a president who believes that government can and should be able to solve all problems. Obama has never sounded particularly enthusiastic about the private sector, and some of his congressional colleagues—the ones talking of retroactively raising the cap on BP’s liability, for example, or forcing BP to pay for the lost wages of other oil company’s workers—are downright hostile.

A large part of the explanation is cultural, however: Obama has been forced to take on a commanding role in a crisis he cannot control because we expect him to—both “we” the media, and “we” the bipartisan public. Whatever their politics, most Americans in recent years have come to expect a strong response—an invasion, a massive congressional bill—from their politicians in times of crisis, and this one is no exception. We want the president to lead—somewhere, anywhere. A few days ago, the New York Times declared that “he and his administration need to do a lot more to show they are on top of this mess,” and should have started “putting the heat” on BP much earlier—as if that would have made the remotest bit of difference. …

Paradoxically, “talking tough” about this oil crisis also makes both Obama and America look weak internationally—just as “talking tough” about Iran made the Bush administration look weak. Harsh rhetoric is fine if it reflects a real will to do something, a real plan of action, and the existence of a Plan B for when the first one fails. But when angry words—anti-BP, anti-British, anti-oil-company—reflect the absence of any alternative policy whatsoever, they just sound pathetic. It’s right for Obama to be concerned about the consequences of this disaster, but wrong—and dangerous—for him to pretend he is capable of controlling it. We should stop calling on him to do so.

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Christopher Chantrill points out that conservatives have been too frequently playing along with liberal assumptions in criticizing Obama’s handling of the BP Oil Spill and predicts the myth of the ominpotent state will eventually collapse.

It is true that liberalism is cruel, corrupt, wasteful, and unjust. But one should never forget its delusion. The delusion is a simple one. It is a belief that government can be made rational and efficient. This delusion leads our liberal friends into disaster after disaster.

Liberals were shocked that President Bush failed to get everyone tucked up in bed in a couple of days after Hurricane Katrina. They knew that a rational and efficient government, run by people like them who believed in government, could do better.

Now President Obama is busy proving them wrong.

Unfortunately, conservatives aren’t helping. In pointing out the serious lapses in the president’s leadership qualities, we conservatives are missing the point. We are encouraging liberals in their delusion. Instead, we should remind everyone that of course a bunch of corporate bureaucrats, combined with a bunch of government bureaucrats, are going to be a bit off the mark. …

How does a religion collapse? During the Christianization of northern Europe, the monks would topple the idols of the pagan gods. See, they said, our true God is more powerful than your gods.

Is that how liberalism will come to an end? When the Keynesian idols are finally toppled? Most likely the end will catch everyone by surprise, like the sudden collapse of the Soviet Union.

Hat tip to the News Junkie.

“Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain!”

Gene Healy describes how our popular cultural habit of demanding intervention by a supposedly omnipotent and omniscient state will produce no real results other than a larger and more powerful state. The government will not, however, develop the desired capabilities of preventing untoward events and effectuating instant solutions.

Did you plug the hole yet, Daddy?” 11-year-old Malia demanded Thursday morning while the president was shaving. Poor President Obama: even his kids won’t give him a break about the Gulf oil spill.

Tough. It’s hard to feel sorry for the “Yes We Can” candidate, who got the job by stoking the juvenile expectation that there’s a presidential solution to everything from natural disasters to spiritual malaise.

But the adults among us ought to worry about a political culture that reacts to every difficulty by screaming “Save us, Superpresident!”

It’s “taking so doggone long,” Sarah Palin wailed, for Obama “to dive in there” (literally?). “Man, you got to get down here and take control!” James Carville screeched. “Tell BP, ‘I’m your daddy!'”

When Hurricane Katrina hit, liberals who had spent years calling President Bush a tyrant suddenly decided he wasn’t authoritarian enough when he hesitated to declare himself generalissimo of New Orleans and muster the troops for a federal War on Hurricanes.

Now the party of “drill, baby, drill” — the folks who warn that Obama’s a socialist — is screaming bloody murder because he’s letting the private sector take the lead in the well-capping operation. It’s almost enough to make a guy cynical about politics.

What do Carville, Palin, et al. want the president to do? “Replace [BP] with what?” asks Coast Guard Adm. Thad Allen, commanding officer at the scene. As the president admitted Thursday, “The federal government does not possess superior technology to BP,” which is trying to clean up its mess with backup from a team of scientists and engineers assembled by the feds.

Should Obama travel back in time and institute better regulation? “He could’ve demanded a plan in anticipation of this,” Carville insists.

Perhaps, but it’s hardly surprising that a president who sits atop a 2-million-employee executive branch, pretending to run it, hasn’t magically solved the problem of bureaucratic incompetence or devised a plan to deal with every conceivable hazard life might present. …

The public’s frustration is understandable. But the unreflective cry “Do something!” usually results in policies that follow the logic immortalized in the BBC comedy “Yes, Minister”: “Something must be done. This is something. Therefore we must do it!”

In Hurricane Katrina’s aftermath, that “something” was legislation (thankfully repealed in 2008) giving the president dangerous new powers to use troops at home to restore order and institute military quarantines during natural disasters or disease outbreaks. …

BP will pay dearly for its apparent negligence, ending up poorer and smaller as a result of the spill. Not so with the federal government: disasters are the health of the state.

That dynamic won’t change as long as pundits, pols and the public embrace the poisonous notion that the president is America’s daddy.

We live today in a country differing from the America of the past in which the rule of law prevailed, and increasingly resembling one of the Latin American republics in which a strong man takes power and proceeds to set aside the law and his country’s constitution in order to rule by decree.

Yesterday’s Wall Street Journal reported that Barack Obama simply ordered BP to pay the salaries of all the oil workers laid off as the result of the drilling moratorium he himself had decreed. No due process, no court action, just an edict.

The Obama Administration ratcheted up its demands on Wednesday that BP PLC cover all costs stemming from the Gulf of Mexico oil spill, including millions of dollars in salaries of oil-industry workers laid off because of the federal moratorium on deepwater drilling.

The sudden increase in BP’s potential liabilities—along with growing evidence that even more oil than expected is gushing from BP’s crippled well—helped send BP’s shares plummeting almost 16% in New York, to $29.20. The stock has lost close to half its value, more than $82 billion, in the seven weeks since the spill started.

A second WSJ article reported that a coast guard admiral additionally ordered BP to pay hundreds of millions of dollars to construct berms. Once again, no legal process whatsoever had occurred. There is clearly no rule of law in this country. Even coast guard officers get to rule by decree.

Construction is about to begin on miles of sand piles designed to block oil in the Gulf of Mexico from hitting the Louisiana coast, but documents show the Obama administration approved the building of sand berms despite concerns from some of its own environmental experts.

The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers authorized the berms. Thad Allen, the Coast Guard admiral overseeing the spill response, ordered BP PLC to pay the hundreds of millions of dollars that officials estimate it will cost to build the structures.

In announcing his decision June 2, Adm. Allen said the berms would “effectively stem potential damage to these fragile shorelines.”

It can be impossible to obtain redress for these kinds of wholly illegal actions by public officials, even ones many levels below the President of the United States.

During the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin and Police Superintendent Eddie Compass simply ignored legal considerations and issued an order saying: “No one will be able to be armed. Guns will be taken. Only law enforcement will be allowed to have guns.” They then used both New Orleans police and National Guard troops to confiscate private firearms refusing even to issue receipts.

When, months later, all this reached federal court, New Orleans denied having seized private firearms, then later denied having any still in its possession, and generally simply stonewalled. Only after three years of litigation, which New Orleans lost, did the city admit seizing guns and promise to return whatever private property remained in its possession.

Barack Obama lectured for 12 years at the University of Chicago Law School before running for the presidency, but that did not prevent him last year from simply brushing aside the entire body of bankruptcy law to subordinate the claims of Chrysler bondholders in favor of the interest of the UAW.

Members of his administration then proceeded to intimidate the victims with threats of using allies in the press to destroy their reputation. Most bond-holding creditors knuckled under, but three Indiana pension funds did go to court. The US Supreme Court voided a Second Circuit Court of Appeals ruling upholding the illegal cramdown, but also referred the case back to the Second Circuit instructing the Appeals Court to hold the matter moot. Thus, the Supreme Court acted to prevent Barack Obama’s action a legal precedent, but refused to do justice and make the Indiana pension funds whole. The law was theoretically preserved intact, despite Obama’s violation, but not actually enforced in the Chrysler bankruptcy.

We are developing an alternative system of government by fiat fueled by press-reported crisis, in which government officials assume the powers of dictatorship. So far, the courts have proven to be not only slow, but ineffective, defenders of the rule of law.

George Will observes that the spectre of real world consequences is haunting Barack Obama and his democrat allies.

Concerning the job numbers from May, one can almost echo Henry James’s exclamation after examining letters pertaining to Lord Byron’s incest: “Nauseating perhaps, but how quite inexpressibly significant.” Except that the May numbers’ significance can be expressed: A theory is being nibbled to death by facts.

Private-sector job creation almost stopped in May.

The Progressive attempt to change America into a European-style Socialist Welfare State in the midst of an economic crisis has, it is increasingly becoming clear, prevented the recovery that should now be well underway, and deepened the misery.

Americans are experiencing hard times, wholesale bank and business failures, joblessness, and home foreclosures in a fashion not seen since the Great Depression.

All this coincides with state government bankruptcies and a European crisis caused by exactly the same policies. Governments everywhere are discovering the truth of Margaret Thatcher’s dictum that “the problem with Socialism is that, sooner or later, you run out of other people’s money.

Democrats are going to be annihilated in next November’s elections.

Former President, New Community-Organizer-in-Chief and 12th Imam Muhammad al-Mahdi, formerly Barack Hussein Obama

David Corn, in Mother Jones:

Glenn Beck mysteriously killed. The GOP driven out of Congress. Obama proclaims himself the “Lost Imam.”

It’s January 2011. The GOP is about to assume control of both houses of Congress—having been voted in by a public deeply suspicious of Democrats after President Barack Obama conducted clandestine talks with President Felipe Calderon of Mexico and Prime Minister Stephen Harper of Canada. But two days before the new conservative majority is to be sworn in, Obama announces that this Congress will not be seated, that the United States (a creation of “racists and warmongers”) will be replaced by a North American Union, that the US Constitution will be dissolved, and that private ownership of firearms will be outlawed (as part of a United Nations treaty banning firearms globally). In response, millions rise up, and the Revolution begins. …

[This is] the premise for a new [as of October, 2009] online computer game hosted by a website called United States of Earth.

In the game’s scenario, 20 million armed American “patriots” begin seizing local and federal government offices. These are the same people whose earlier Tea Party protests had been ignored and dismissed by the mainstream media. Now, they post bounties for government employees. There’s fighting in every state. Meanwhile, Lou Dobbs has been disappeared, and Glenn Beck has been found dead of an “aspirin overdose.” Rush Limbaugh, Michelle Malkin, Sean Hannity, and Bill O’Reilly have been rounded up, and Fox News forcibly shut down. The US military refuses to come to Obama’s rescue. His loyalist forces of 40,000 end up controlling merely three counties in Virginia, while an allied force is in charge of three counties near Washington, DC. The Federal Reserve also controls two of its own counties, as does the Cong (the remnants of the Democratic Congress). A collection of pro-Obama black nationalists and Islamic fundamentalists have a hold on two counties. What can you do as a player? You can join the patriots trying to capture Obama and defeat the Cong.

The only rumors of Barack Obama’s intended coup d’etat that I’ve heard pertain to an on-line game obviously having a certain amount of fun with paranoid fantasies.

But J.R. Dunn, who is a well-known and respected editorialist at American Thinker, has been receiving comments from his readers containing real rumors of the sort in recent weeks (He must be attracting even more colorful commenters than me!), and is actually editorializing on the unlikeliness of such a thing.

We’ve been hearing a lot of comments recently about a national coup d’etat scheduled for sometime in late summer or early fall and designed to circumvent the coming Democrat debacle in the 2010 elections.

This is an example of political gothic of a type that I tend to overlook. But my interest was piqued by the fact that it has been mentioned several dozen times in the comment threads of essays of mine in recent weeks. I’ve had a little difficulty grasping exactly how such a thing would work, so I’ve spent the last few days puzzling it out.

The contention is that at some point before the upcoming November elections, an “incident” of some violent but unknown nature will occur that will provide Obama with the opportunity to declare “martial law” across the country, which will involve the “cancellation” or “postponement” of the elections. This will enable the Obama dictatorship to take off its humanist mask and put its true agenda into play.

Personally, I’m going to practice up by playing some of that United States of Earth game.

The idea of Barack Obama taking Spike Lee’s advice predictably inspires ridicule.

1:50 video

Dorothy Rabinowitz associates the growing disenchantment with the once so terribly popular Barack Obama with Americans’ gradual recognition of just how differently Barack Obama, and his appointees, view reality.

Obama is not a space alien. He’s merely a perfect representative of a leftist elite which has little respect for, and less in common with, ordinary Americans.

[I]t was clear from the first that this president—single-minded, ever-visible, confident in his program for a reformed America saved from darkness by his arrival—was wanting in certain qualities citizens have until now taken for granted in their presidents. Namely, a tone and presence that said: This is the Americans’ leader, a man of them, for them, the nation’s voice and champion. Mr. Obama wasn’t lacking in concern about the oil spill. What he lacked was that voice—and for good reason. …

A great part of America now understands that this president’s sense of identification lies elsewhere, and is in profound ways unlike theirs. He is hard put to sound convincingly like the leader of the nation, because he is, at heart and by instinct, the voice mainly of his ideological class. He is the alien in the White House, a matter having nothing to do with delusions about his birthplace cherished by the demented fringe.

One of his first reforms was to rid the White House of the bust of Winston Churchill—a gift from Tony Blair—by packing it back off to 10 Downing Street. A cloudlet of mystery has surrounded the subject ever since, but the central fact stands clear. The new administration had apparently found no place in our national house of many rooms for the British leader who lives on so vividly in the American mind. Churchill, face of our shared wartime struggle, dauntless rallier of his nation who continues, so remarkably, to speak to ours. For a president to whom such associations are alien, ridding the White House of Churchill would, of course, have raised no second thoughts.

Far greater strangeness has since flowed steadily from Washington. The president’s appointees, transmitters of policy, go forth with singular passion week after week, delivering the latest inversion of reality. Their work is not easy, focused as it is on a current prime preoccupation of this White House—that is, finding ways to avoid any public mention of the indisputable Islamist identity of the enemy at war with us. No small trick that, but their efforts go forward in public spectacles matchless in their absurdity—unnerving in what they confirm about our current guardians of law and national security.

Consider the hapless Eric Holder, America’s attorney general, confronting the question put to him by Rep. Lamar Smith (R., Texas) of the House Judicary Committee on May 13.

Did Mr. Holder think that in the last three terrorist attempts on this soil, one of them successful (Maj. Nidal Hasan’s murder of 13 soldiers at Fort Hood, preceded by his shout of “Allahu Akbar!”), that radical Islam might have played any role at all? Mr. Holder seemed puzzled by the question. “People have different reasons” he finally answered—a response he repeated three times. He didn’t want “to say anything negative about any religion.”

And who can forget the exhortations on jihad by John Brennan, Mr. Obama’s chief adviser on counterterrorism? Mr. Brennan has in the past charged that Americans lack sensitivity to the Muslim world, and that we have particularly failed to credit its peace-loving disposition. In a May 26 speech at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, Mr. Brennan held forth fervently, if not quite comprehensibly, on who our enemy was not: “Our enemy is not terrorism because terrorism is just a tactic. Our enemy is not terror because terror is a state of mind, and as Americans we refuse to live in fear.”

He went on to announce, sternly, that we do not refer to our enemies as Islamists or jihadists because jihad is a holy struggle, a legitimate tenet of Islam. How then might we be permitted to describe our enemies? One hint comes from another of Mr. Brennan’s pronouncements in that speech: That “violent extremists are victims of political, economic and social forces.”

Yes, that would work. Consider the news bulletins we could have read: “Police have arrested Faisal Shahzad, victim of political, economic and social forces living in Connecticut, for efforts to set off a car bomb explosion in Times Square.” Plotters in Afghanistan and Yemen, preparing for their next attempt at mass murder in America, could only have listened in wonderment. They must have marvelled in particular on learning that this was the chief counterterrorism adviser to the president of the United States.

Long after Mr. Obama leaves office, it will be this parade of explicators, laboring mightily to sell each new piece of official reality revisionism—Janet Napolitano and her immortal “man-caused disasters” among them—that will stand most memorably as the face of this administration.

It is a White House that has focused consistently on the sensitivities of the world community—as it is euphemistically known—a body of which the president of the United States frequently appears to view himself as a representative at large.

Bill Hobbs: “If you think Sarah Palin would do better job than Obama re BP and the oil spill, you’re right. In fact she already has.”

As Governor of Alaska, I did everything in my power to hold oil companies accountable in order to prove to the federal government and to the nation that Alaska could be trusted to further develop energy rich land like ANWR and NPR-A. I hired conscientious Democrats and Republicans (because this sure shouldn’t be a partisan issue) to provide me with the best advice on how we could deal with what was a corrupt system of some lawmakers and administrators who were hesitant to play hardball with some in the oil field business. …

BP’s operation in Alaska would hurt our state and waste public resources if allowed to continue. That’s why my administration created the Petroleum Systems Integrity Office (PSIO) when we saw proof of improper maintenance of oil infrastructure in our state. We had to verify. And that’s why we instituted new oversight and held BP and other oil companies financially accountable for poor maintenance practices. We knew we could partner with them to develop resources without pussyfooting around with them. As a CEO, it was my job to look out for the interests of Alaskans with the same intensity and action as the oil company CEOs looked out for the interests of their shareholders.

The Revolution has not been effectuated and the left is turning on him. Former Beatle Paul McCarthy gushing over Obama is so two years ago, writes Toby Harnden in the Telegraph.

[I]t was not just McCartney’s dyed hair and 1960s songs that seemed so retro. His adulation of Obama struck the wrong chord because few outside the White House bubble are in that place any more. It is now permissible – even fashionable – to have a go at the man once hailed as the Messiah.

Atlas sostiene la volta celeste, 2nd Century A.D., Collezione Farnese, National Archaeological Museum, Naples.

Claude Sandroff reacts with wholesome indignation to the ritual immolation of the corporate scapegoat by the High Priest of the Cult of the State and his media acolytes.

Obama and his team of thugs are dressed out in heavy boots aimed at BP’s neck. Apparently, oil booms and actionable emergency plans are in short supply in the government, but the Obama administration is buried under a glut of hard heels in a variety of men’s and women’s sizes. And they’re all ready to stomp on BP’s jugular.

Adding to BP’s public relations woes are some of Hollywood’s film geniuses, probably armed with decades of deep-water drilling experience, only too happy to dismiss the exhausted and skilled BP repair staff as a bunch of morons. My advice to the BP board of directors is that they simply accept the third-party assessments of their qualifications and tell Obama, his government, and his media acolytes that the time has come for them to take charge of capping the Deepwater Horizon riser. …

In the midst of this major ecological calamity, when BP can least cope with major distractions and vile recriminations, Obama’s clueless legal team has decided to threaten the company with a criminal probe. Tone-deaf Eric Holder is unable to pronounce the words “Islamic terrorist,” but he has already unleashed his justice department to cripple BP, essentially labeling it a criminal enterprise. Perhaps Obama and his band of goons need to hear from BP that they are stopping all capping efforts to concentrate on their legal defense.

As a BP shareholder, I wouldn’t be upset. Rather, I’d applaud BP’s actions and even buy more stock with full knowledge that its declaration of bankruptcy is all but guaranteed. It’s already rumored that some of BP’s valuable drilling assets in Alaska might have to be sold off to pay for the Gulf cleanup.

It’s a brilliant idea to sell those assets as quickly as possible. The environmental hit teams have no intention of letting anyone, anywhere, drill in the U.S. ever again. Not in Alaska, not in the Rockies, not in shallow water, and certainly not in deep water. Only the Brazilians and the Norwegians and the Mexicans, and the Chinese and the Indians and the British and the Angolans — only everyone else will be allowed to do that. …

BP must accept the reality that it is not GM. BO has no vast democrat union base of employees that must be protected at all costs and no mass vote-generating machine to deliver for Obama. They are expendable. They are not even GE, in complete control of a sycophantic media outlet always ready to sing the praises of Obama on broadcast and cable outlets, all day and all night.

BP might become Government Petroleum soon enough if they don’t act quickly. They should offer to sell off their expertise and assets to the Chinese, who at least will appreciate them and use them aggressively. While China’s state-owned oil exploration company, CNOOC, was denied the prize of Unocal in 2005, the United States is in a much weaker economic, military, and political position today with respect to China. Surely a BP sale would breeze through a regulatory review in today’s climate.

Assured access to a plentiful, long-term oil supply is the chief foreign policy concern of China. And BP could revel soon in the irony of drilling again in deep Gulf waters — only this time for the Chinese off the coast of Cuba.