In the midst of the BP oil spill, hysterics were common place. Even though the Gulf had survived a previous such oil spill decades earlier, the BP spill was all but portrayed as the coming of the apocalypse. It would take decades to recover. Things would never be the same. We must stop drilling for oil, now and forever!

Of course, things were bad. There’s no denying that the spill severely disrupted Gulf coast economies and harmed the environment. But it wasn’t nearly as bad as many claimed. In other words, the environmental reactionaries did their usual overreaction:

After BP’s Macondo well in the Gulf of Mexico blew out a year ago today, many feared that the resulting oil spill would turn the Gulf into a dead sea, destroy its beaches, kill its vibrant seafood and tourism industries and mortally wound the economies of states from Florida to Texas.

The spill’s long-term effects on the environment are still a serious question, but the Gulf turned out to be surprisingly resilient, and so far the news has been unexpectedly good. Most of the oil is gone. Fishing has resumed, the beaches are clean (with some exceptions), tourist bookings are up and Gulf seafood is safe to eat.

Let’s keep this in mind as they move on to preach environmental doom elsewhere.

Whenever big disasters strike, opportunists jump at the chance to lampoon their political opponents. In response to the oil spill in the Gulf, we’re seeing just that as many on the right begin to construct the narrative that Obama’s response was slow or deficient. In so doing they are following the playbook successfully executed against Bush after hurricane Katrina.

There may well turn out to be faults in Obama’s response to the oil spill.  No doubt there will be investigations, inquiries and fact-finding panels aplenty after things have settled down. Right now, however, I’m concerned that critics of the administration are falling into a big government trap.

It may well be that they can do the kind of harm to Obama that Katrina helped liberals do to Bush. But this is only a short-term benefit. In the long run their critiques only feed the view that government should be responsible for all things, and that the President is essentially a King who must only snap his fingers and see his will done.

Far more productive for small government advocates would be to point out that, as we saw with Katrina, government simply cannot and should not be counted on to respond with quickness and efficiency in the event of catastrophe. Bureaucracies are simply not well designed for the purpose, and blaming Obama only spreads the myth that with the right kind of interventionist President, government can be made into something it is not.

The incompetence of FEMA was not primarily the fault of Bush and any incompetence in wake of the oil spill is likely not the fault of Obama. It’s the fault of all Presidents and Congresses that have contributed to the growth of such a behemoth government in the first place, and the fault of all of us here perpetuate the idea that the first place to look for assistance in time of crisis is the federal government.