So, by that standard the entire cabinet is supposed to sit down and shut up in deference to the King? At what point do officers in our government stand up and say enough is enough? When do they stop being good little soldiers? I expect a lot more from our government officials.

If someone gives me a job, I do it. I have been in a position where I disagreed strongly with a boss’ approach to a given job, so I quit rather than remain in an untenable position.

I expect similar conduct by our officials. If they cannot bring change within their position, then at least a very public resignation can draw attention to a serious problem and force change via external pressure.

You seem to think Napolitano’s silence is acceptable. I do not. Not only that, she hasn’t remained silent. She did make a public statement weeks ago that the federal government did not have the resources nor the talent to deal with the spill which is why they had to wait on BP. That was a shockingly false (or possibly ignorant) statement to make.

Don’t get me wrong, the problem goes way beyond Napolitano. Lubchenko is a lot worse and I haven’t the slightest idea of what Chu is doing. There is plenty of blame to go around and I think we need to start at the top with Obama.

But my point is, that our federal officials are not competent with technology. They defer too readily to corporations and contractors. Do you seriously think we should allow them to deploy UAVs for any purpose whatsoever on our own soil? The possibility of such technology (which has been repeatedly demonstrated overseas to be lethally imprecise) being used here on our citizenry is frightening. Really really frightening.

I have not seen a level of competence demonstrated by federal officials in the last decade to make me sanguine about this possibility in the least. It isn’t just Napolitano, it is a political class that has been repeatedly wrong about everything. Giving them extraordinarily dangerous weapons to wield domestically strikes me as a spectacularly bad idea.

To give an example, the EPA ought to be very much involved in the assessment and direction of cleanup. You heard anything substantive about the EPA?? The answer is no, no you haven’t.

Actually, I have. The last time I heard anything, the EPA ordered BP to stop using Corexit. The result? BP flipped a finger at the EPA and continued using Corexit. So, I guess the WH/DOE? refused to back up the EPA on this, and Lisa Jackson was reduced to doing cameo appearances on CNN, pretending to do stuff.

I think part of phred’s problem with Napolitano is that she took over a huge enormous bureaucracy created under Bush and staffed by Bush managers. Napolitano is a good administrator, but it takes even a good administrator a while to tame a huge bureaucracy. She probably did a bunch of house-cleaning early on, but this crisis is revealing a new class of personnel issues that she will have to deal with.

We are seeing the same problems more publicly at the Dept of the Interior with MMS. Salazar did some initial housecleaning, but the present crisis has revealed a deeply embedded institutional culture that will take a while to reform, even after the agency is split up.

Bob in AZ

She is far, far more than “reasonably intelligent. Furthermore, despite what you may read or believe, Napolitano is not even close to being in charge of the response. The entire matter is being driven by the White House and DOE. The normal functions of all the agencies has been superseded in an extremely bizarre manner on orders from the White House. To give an example, the EPA ought to be very much involved in the assessment and direction of cleanup. You heard anything substantive about the EPA?? The answer is no, no you haven’t. They are perplexed too from my understanding. Same thing in a lot of places. Just because Thad Allen bleats that he is under DHS, you should not buy into that Napolitano is directing everything; I guarantee you she is not. Things are not what they seem. You are dead wrong about who and what Janet Napolitano is.

Bmaz,

I think you’re telling us that Obama’s obsession with secrecy and his desire to severely punish whistleblowers applies with equal and perhaps greater force within his administration. That is, there are people in a small inner circle who are in the know, which includes BP, and people within his administration like Janet Napolitano, Lisa Jackson, and Jane Lubchenko who are not within that circle who are expected to do and say what they are told without asking questions. Their desire to be of service and their fear of reprisals for “talking out of school,” keeps them in line for the time being, but they cannot help but wonder what’s up and fear the worst.

You and I have discussed the sedimentary formation fracturing problem and the absolute necessity for BP’s engineers to intersect the very slender well bore with the relief well far enough above the reservoir to avoid opening another path from the reservoir to the surface, yet close enough to the reservoir to be well below the compromised part of the well. The race against time is to intersect that virtual needle in the proverbial haystack before the well widens into a volcanic vent or the sedimentary formation collapses into the reservoir. I sense that you and I agree that the survival of life on this planet, or most of it, may depend on winning this race against time as Obama shuts out his own people and defers to BP, a proven textbook villain with its own agenda and a racketeering enterprise in the RICO sense of that term.

Rather disquieting, isn’t it?