President Obama’s declaration that he’d like to see “up to 90 percent” of the Gulf oil spill geyser contained in the next few weeks is a best-case scenario in a worst-case kind of disaster.

From the beginning, BP has failed to meet expectations either to kill the well or contain the oil flowing from it. The containment dome clogged. The “top kill” failed. The “junk shot” accomplished nothing. Even the relatively successful “top cap” operation is apparently still leaking as much as 42,000 barrels (1.8 million gallons) of oil into the Gulf of Mexico daily.

BP and its promises to stem the oil are firmly in “the boy who cried wolf” territory. Yet Mr. Obama, in one of the most important speeches of his presidency, pinned no small amount of his credibility in the crisis on a plan that BP itself is trying to downplay.

Given BP’s performance, it was unwise – and unnecessary, to boot, says Alan Abramowitz, a political scientist at Emory University in Atlanta.

“The ‘90 percent’ line reminds me about the promise that if the stimulus bill is passed, unemployment will peak at 8 percent,” says Mr. Abramowitz. “He could’ve said, ‘We’ll be able to capture more of it,’ but when you put out a number, then people are going to come back and say, ‘How come this didn’t happen?’ From everything that’s happened so far, I’d be surprised if they can actually achieve that.”

http://www.csmonitor.com/USA/2010/0616/Gulf-oil-spill-Will-Obama-regret-his-90-percent-promise

Conservative radio host Rush Limbaugh famously said he hoped President Obama would “fail” in January, 2009. Almost a year later, when Limbaugh was rushed to the hospital with chest pains, Washington Post reporter David Weigel had a wish of his own. “I hope he fails,” Weigel cracked to fellow liberal reporters on the “Journolist” email list-serv.

“Too soon?” he wondered.

Weigel was hired this spring by the Post to cover the conservative movement. Almost from the beginning there have been complaints that his coverage betrays a personal animus toward conservatives.  E-mails obtained by the Daily Caller suggest those complaints have merit.

“Honestly, it’s been tough to find fresh angles sometimes–how many times can I report that these [tea party] activists are joyfully signing up with the agenda of discredited right-winger X and discredited right-wing group Y?” Weigel lamented in one February email.

In other posts, Weigel describes conservatives as using the media to “violently, angrily divide America.” According to Weigel, their motives include “racism” and protecting “white privilege,” and for some of the top conservatives in D.C., a nihilistic thirst for power.

“There’s also the fact that neither the pundits, nor possibly the Republicans, will be punished for their crazy outbursts of racism. Newt Gingrich is an amoral blowhard who resigned in disgrace, and Pat Buchanan is an anti-Semite who was drummed out of the movement by William F. Buckley. Both are now polluting my inbox and TV with their bellowing and minority-bashing. They’re never going to go away or be deprived of their soapboxes,” Weigel wrote.

Of Matt Drudge, Weigel remarked,  “It’s really a disgrace that an amoral shut-in like Drudge maintains the influence he does on the news cycle while gay-baiting, lying, and flubbing facts to this degree.”

In April, Weigel wrote that the problem with the mainstream media is “this need to give equal/extra time to ‘real American’ views, no matter how f#$%@!% moronic, which just so happen to be the views of the conglomerates that run the media and/or buy up ads.”

Read more: http://dailycaller.com/2010/06/25/emails-reveal-post-reporter-savaging-conservatives-rooting-for-democrats/#ixzz0rsCzoa5Z