by Agence France-Presse
WASHINGTON
– Right-wing darling Sarah Palin accused President Barack Obama on Sunday of
being lax in his response to the Gulf of Mexico oil disaster and suggested this
was because he is too close to Big Oil.
The
former vice presidential candidate and Alaska governor, who champions offshore
drilling, criticized the media for not drawing the link between Obama and Big
Oil and said if this spill had happened under former President George W. Bush
the scrutiny would have been far tougher.
“I
don’t know why the question isn’t asked by the mainstream media and by others
if there’s any connection with the contributions made to President Obama and
his administration and the support by the oil companies to the
administration,” she told Fox News Sunday.
More
than $3.5 million has been given to candidates by BP over the last 20 years,
with the largest single donation, $77,051, going to Obama, according to the
Center for Responsive Politics.
Palin
suggested this close relationship explained why Obama was “taking so
doggone long to get in there, to dive in there, and grasp the complexity and
the potential tragedy that we are seeing here in the Gulf of Mexico.”
The
BP-leased Deepwater Horizon rig exploded on April 20, killing 11 workers, and
sank two days later. Ever since, hundreds of thousands of gallons of oil,
perhaps even millions, have been spewing each day into the sea.
The
resulting slick, now the size of a small country, threatens to leave Louisiana’s
fishing and coastal tourism industries in tatters, ruin pristine nature
reserves, and cause decades of harm to the ecology of fragile marshes that are
a haven for rare wildlife and migratory birds.
The
Obama administration has been forced to defend its response to the disaster as
some Republicans have sought to portray it as its Katrina, an allusion to
Bush’s mishandling of the response to the hurricane that devastated Louisiana
in 2005.
White
House spokesman Robert Gibbs mocked Palin’s suggestions that Obama was somehow
in bed with the big oil companies because of 2008 presidential campaign
contributions.
“Sarah
Palin was involved in that election, but I don’t think, apparently, was paying
a whole lot of attention,” Gibbs said on CBS’s “Face the Nation”
program. “I’m almost sure that the oil companies don’t consider the Obama
administration a huge ally. We proposed a windfall profits tax when they jacked
their oil prices up to charge for gasoline. My suggestion to Sarah Palin would
be to get slightly more informed as to what’s going on in and around oil
drilling in this country.”
Earlier
this month, Obama ratcheted up criticism of BP over the spills, betraying
frustration with the company’s failure to stop the leak, and more recently
announced a bipartisan presidential commission to probe the huge oil spill.
Obama
has also accused oil companies of enjoying a “cozy relationship” with
the Minerals Management Service, the federal agency set up to monitor the
energy sector, which was later broken up into three separate agencies. He
ordered “top to bottom” reform of the agency after it was accused of
allowing BP and other oil companies to drill in the Gulf without first
obtaining required permits.
“BP
will pay for every bit of this,” Gibbs said Sunday. “We have to
figure out and make sure that the relationship that is had with government and
oil companies is not a cozy relationship as the president said.”
He
also dismissed analogies with Katrina, which still haunts U.S. politics and
provides an easy comparison for the media when considering the longer-term
fallout that may plague Obama’s energy agenda for months or even years.
“If
you look back at what happened in Katrina, the government wasn’t there to
respond to what was happening,” said Gibbs. “That quite frankly was
the problem. I think the difference in this case is we were there immediately.
We have been there ever since.”
Palin,
who quit the Alaska governorship after serving less than half of one term,
famously promoted the slogan “Drill, baby, drill!” that rallied
supporters while dismissing possible environmental impact of offshore drilling.
Her detractors switched the line to “Spill, baby, spill!”
Related Links:
In wake of Gulf spill, should this be the summer of energy reform?
Show how much you—and BP—care with a commemorative oil spill T-shirt
Matthews tells Obama to kill BP’s disaster capitalism
