Dana Perino apparently thinks everyone should quit being so mean to BP and that they'll play nicer if everyone just quits talking badly about them. She took offense to a statement made by White House climate and energy adviser Carol Browner on Face the Nation.

White House official accuses BP of 'vested interest' in minimizing spill:

A top White House official and a senior Democrat on Sunday attacked BP for downplaying the amount of oil flowing into the Gulf of Mexico, accusing the oil giant of protecting its financial interests in low-balling the gusher’s size.

The tough line with the company comes a day after BP and federal officials abandoned the “top kill” effort to block the damaged well.

“It is important to understand that BP has a financial interest in what those flow rates are. They will ultimately pay a fine based on those rates,” said Carol Browner, the White House climate and energy adviser, on CBS’s “Face the Nation.”

“It is important for people to understand [that] BP has a vested financial interest in downplaying the size of this,” Browner later added. “We are on top of it. We have the best minds looking at it.”

Perino claimed that there's no way BP is going to get away with taking responsibility for the disaster because the 24/7 news coverage the spill is getting. Yeah right. Tell that to those fisherman in Alaska who your lovely right wing buddies on the Supreme Court stuck it to after all those years Dana.

She was also asked about Joe Klein's statement that the BP oil spill is actually Bush's second Katrina and after calling Klein a "petty and partisan" and said the argument doesn't hold water since it's month fifteen of the Obama administration and the people at the MMS who are being criticized aren't political appointees but career civil servants. I can't disagree with her about Obama not having cleaned up MMS and continuing too many of Bush's policies after fifteen months, but I'm not sure why she thinks that excuses her ex-boss from putting industry hacks who don't believe in regulation in charge of regulating the oil industry. She then said that no one has proven that deregulation has anything to do with the oil spill. Lastly to add insult to injury she blamed environmentalists for this because they forced the oil industry to go so far offshore.

Typical Bushie, deny, distort and deflect. There's a whole lot of blame to go around for this mess but pretending the Bush administration isn't responsible for the policies that led to the disaster is ridiculous. Trust industry to do whatever it wants, we don't need any rules of the road or to opt for safety over production and when things blow up in your face, socialize industry's losses.

I'm sure there are a lot of Molly Ivins fans that visit Crooks and Liars. If you've never read her book Bushwhacked: Life in George W. Bush's America, what we're seeing with this disaster fits in exactly with the theme of that book and directly counters Perino's hackery.

I read it a long time ago and need to get it back. I loaned it to a friend last year after I was horrified to learn she was a Sean Hannity fan. I was hoping it might help un-brainwash her. I haven't seen her for a while. More than likely I was wasting my time and she never read it, but you never know.

One of the things Molly Ivins did beautifully in that book is to put a human face on what happens when government fails to regulate and do oversight and she explained in each case how someone had been harmed and which Bush flack set the policies that they were living with. The Bush administration didn't just do this to MMS. They did it to every department of government. Here's a bit from one of the reviews at Amazon:

Ivins's mordant wit, political passion and uninhibited energy are unique among political writers and translate into entertaining reading for anti-Bushites. Together with co-author Dubose, Ivins (Shrub) offers a ferocious attack on "Dubya," arguing that he has taken the country in a direction he conveniently failed to mention during the 2000 campaign. That direction, according to Ivins, endangers workers, the poor and disadvantaged, the middle class and, for good measure, the Bill of Rights. Her message is that Bush's education, economic, tax and environmental policies, his energy policy, his response to the Enron scandal all have one thing in common: "setting the fox to guard the chicken coop." The "fox" in this case is business interests; the chickens are the EPA, the SEC, the Federal Energy Regulation Commission and other agencies whose purpose is to protect citizens from capitalism's excesses. Simply put, Bush, according to Ivins, has abandoned the interests of American citizens for the interests of corporate America.

That sums the book up nicely. Obama is still too corporate friendly to suit my taste but we've got Hilda Solis and not Eugene Scalia who doesn't believe in repetitive stress injuries at the Department of Labor. We've got Lisa Jackson and not Christine Todd Whitman who had a huge conflict of interest with her husband, Citigroup and a Superfund cleanup case at EPA.

It's not hard to argue that sadly the Obama administration hasn't gone far enough to clean out the Bush stink and what he did to dismantle government being capable of doing proper regulation and oversight. Legitimate criticisms of his administration are where he's continued Bush's policies. What you can't say without just being a bald faced liar is what Perino attempts to argue here; and that is the Bush policy of allowing business to do anything they want and the conservative philosophy that you don't need any regulation is not directly responsible for what we're dealing with now with this oil spill.

Dana Perino like Liz Cheney this weekend, has no credibility to be weighing in on this oil spill or talking about another administration's response to anything. Like Cheney, she's out there lobbing political stink bombs and trying to get the public to forget about how terrible the former administration was. They blew up the country and scream about how things aren't being fixed now that their policies are coming to fruition.

If Obama doesn't quit trying to play the middle with people who want nothing other than to destroy him and do more with actually reversing those policies, we're in real trouble and this oil spill is not the end of the problems we're going to be facing.