Margaret Carlson Despairs that After Bush-Cheney Big Oil is 'Too Big to Regulate'

"Eight years of the Bush-Cheney administration removing regulations" has made it so "now the oil industry is too big to regulate," former Time magazine Deputy Washington Bureau Chief Margaret Carlson fretted on Friday's Political Capital show on Bloomberg TV.

Defending Barack Obama against the notion the gulf oil disaster is "Obama's Katrina," Carlson, a columnist for Bloomberg News [1], argued on the weekly Friday night program hosted by Al Hunt:

The government is prepared for natural disasters, as in Katrina, if government is willing to act - which it wasn't in Katrina. Corporate disasters are another matter. The government doesn't have the equipment or the expertise. They can only oversee it.

And by the way, you know in a natural disaster government has an agency. We don't have an agency. What we had was eight years of the Bush-Cheney administration removing regulations. Now the oil industry is too big to regulate.

Her confusingly-titled May 27 column for Bloomberg, "That Damn Leak Can't Blame Obama for Katrina [2]," begins: "Big government? Bring it on, to borrow the words of our previous commander-in-chief."

- Brent Baker is Vice President for Research and Publications at the Media Research Center. Click here [3] to follow him on Twitter.