Gangster government and the Gulf oil spill

Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal claims in his new book -- titled "Leadership and Crisis" -- that President Obama threatened him after he asked the White House to expedite approval of Food Stamp benefits for Gulf Coast residents left homeless by the Deepwater Horizon oil spill.

"Careful, this is going to get bad for everyone," he quoted Obama as saying. Standing nearby, according to Jindal, White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel was throwing around F-bombs while chewing out the governor's chief of staff: "If you have a problem, pick up the f---ing phone." When Jindal later expressed worries that a White House-imposed moratorium on oil and gas drilling in the Gulf of Mexico would drive up joblessness in his state, Jindal claims Obama was more concerned about standing in the polls. "The human element seemed invisible to the White House," Jindal said in his book.

The Louisiana governor is anything but a disinterested observer in these matters, to be sure, but neither are Republicans like Jindal the only critics of Obama's seeming distance from the harsh economic realities of the spill and his obliviousness to how federal policies compounded the misery. Even hyper-Democratic partisan James Carville lamented the tardiness of Obama's response to the spill, calling it "one of the greatest lost political opportunities I've ever seen."

The political fallout from Jindal's book is likely to be magnified by an Interior Department inspector general report. Interior IG Mary Kendall investigated claims that the White House misrepresented the views of seven scientists who had been asked to assess the effect of a six-month moratorium on drilling in the Gulf. "After reviewing different drafts of the Executive Summary that were exchanged between DOI and the White House prior to its final issuance, the OIG determined that the White House edit of the original DOI draft Executive Summary led to the implication that the moratorium recommendation had been peer-reviewed by experts," Kendall said. White House energy czar Carol Browner was responsible for the revisions that prompted the outside scientists to protest publicly that they were being misrepresented by federal officials.

The only surprise in all of this is that anybody would be surprised. Or that neither Obama nor his White House spokesmen have stepped forward to deny any of the details in either Jindal's account of the Food Stamp incident or the Interior Department IG's report. After all, threatening retaliation against critics and using confrontational language in an attempt to intimidate them is par for the course for the Chicago-style gangster government that nurtured Obama and his now-former chief of staff.

Read more at the Washington Examiner: http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/Gangster-government-and-the-Gulf-oil-spill-1542827-107570553.html#ixzz15GMyhQbu