It looks like a narrative is emerging that the massive oil spill in the gulf is now Obama’s Katrina. This makes sense, if you don’t remember much about Katrina, or know much about this oil spill.

It is true that this oil spill is likely to exceed the environmental damage and human cost that even Katrina dished out.

But the problem with Katrina was that we knew it was coming. Then we knew it came. Then we knew the levees broke. Then we knew that people were stranded and starving and desperate. Only after a day or so of chaos did the Bush government swing into action to help actual people in immediate crisis.

The problems this time around are:

• The oil platform explosion was unexpected
• Bad weather hampered initial efforts to figure out what was happening
• British Petroleum totally underestimated the extent of the problem it reported to the government.
• There might not even be a fix to this for 3 months, until they can drill another pipe into the oil field to drain off the leak. That's not a government response problem, it is a science problem. Perhaps it is a government policy problem not to have stricter guidelines when doing off-shore drilling.
• People have been working around the clock on the problem, but since it’s in the middle of the gulf and underground, no one is seeing it, so it gives the impression nothing is being done.

The most ironic thing about this is that the people complaining about the government’s response are the same people that don’t want any government involvement in their lives. Make up your mind, folks. About the only mistake you can say the government made is in believing its profit-oriented industry partner about the extent of the spill. Sounds like a case for more government regulation, oversight and involvement to me. Katrina, indeed.

I say if you want to blame something, blame Karma. Obama reversed himself a month ago to suddenly support off-shore drilling, which conservatives had been demanding since Sarah Palin started the Drill Baby Drill chant at the Republican National Convention. Now we get to learn why potential environmental disasters should factor into our resource-use policies, just like all the tree-huggers say they should. Like Earl, Obama should not have messed with Karma.