That was the question posed by Fred Dalton Thompson, minority counsel to the Senate committee investigating Watergate, and asked by his boss Sen. Howard Baker, the ranking minority member of that committee, that some say ultimately led to the resignation of President Richard Nixon. It may be a question that now needs to be asked, in earnest, of President Barack Obama with regard to the BP disaster in the Gulf of Mexico. According to columnist Kevin McCullough,
It seems incomprehensible that the president and other members of the administration still have jobs when it is now being reported that the federal government was apprised by BP on February 13 that the Deepwater Horizon oil rig was leaking oil and natural gas into the ocean floor.
In fact, according to documents in the administration’s possession, BP was fighting large cracks at the base of the well for roughly ten days in early February.
Further it seems the administration was also informed about this development, six weeks before to the rig’s fatal explosion when an engineer from the University of California, Berkeley, announced to the world a near miss of an explosion on the rig by stating, “They damn near blew up the rig.”
It’s also now being reported that BP was asking for the administration’s help on this matter long before the deadly accident and the now gushing well of tar.
If this is true, then the administration’s inaction—because they were unwilling to take their focus off getting ObamaPelosiCare passed?—was reprehensible. What did the President know, and when did he know it? It’s easy to see why he’s taking the “I was as surprised as you were” tack, telling us he accepted the assurances of others that nothing would go wrong; but if he truly, honestly didn’t know about this—why not, and what does that say about his administration?