Interesting that President Obama now compares the BP oil spill to 9/11. Obama claims the two events have changed the nation's psyche forever.
It's a pretty big call and of course, he will be attacked by people like Nile Gardner in the Daily Telegraph who claims it shows a lack of historical perspective and that the administration is belittling the memory of those who died in the attacks.
Gardner writes: "The al-Qaeda atrocity was a premeditated act of mass murder as well as a declaration of war against America by a brutal and barbaric Islamist enemy, which claimed nearly 3,000 lives, most of them American. It was a seminal event that fundamentally changed the course of history, and altered forever America's outlook on the world. It cannot be reduced to the level of an accidental environmental tragedy, no matter how large, which is an entirely different kind of event altogether."
Still, maybe the parallel is closer than Obama would like us to think.
Rolling Stone points out that like September 11, the administration had plenty of warnings that were ignored.
The Department of the Interior's Mineral Management Services, comprising Bush cronies, simply assumed a spill wouldn't happen. And instead of cracking down on MMS, as he had vowed to do even before taking office, Obama left in place many of the top officials who oversaw the agency's culture of corruption, allowing them to rubber-stamp dangerous drilling operations by BP with virtually no environmental safeguards, using industry-friendly regulations drafted during the Bush years.
The fact that Obama ignored warnings about the BP oil spill show that the parallels with 9/11 run deep. Both show the US government's incompetence.
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