As the president again visited the Gulf, reports that come up that President Obama was first briefed in April on how bad the spill would be and how difficult it would be to plug the hole. Largely Republican critics have pummeled President Obama for being too slow to seize the political responsibility for combating the BP oil spill in the Gulf Coast, now widely thought to be the worst environmental disaster in U.S. history. The White House has is fighting back, releasing a timeline showing the Coast Guard was deployed within 24 hours of the Deepwater Horizon blowout. And the political reality is that because our government does not have the resources to cap a blown out oil well, the more Obama puts himself into the high-profile middle of this, the more it will politically endanger him, just like Jimmy Carter was harmed when the Army couldn't rescue the Iranian hostages. At least in this case, unlike Carter's Iran, the blowout wasn't the result of Republican dirty tricks. Oh - wait a minute - it was Reagan, Bush Sr., and Bush Jr. who executed executive orders to weaken drilling and environmental regulations, and Bush Jr. who so staffed the MMS that oversees oil well drilling with industry shills and incompetents and turned the other way while MMS employees partied, snorted meth, and had sex with paid "lobbyists" from the oil industry including BP. Again, the Republicans create a mess that a Democrat takes blame for and has to try to clean up.