Why Joe Barton Shouldn't Tweet

Rep. Joe Barton's Twitter account had the tweet "Joe Barton was right." The tweet linked to an American Spectator article. The tweet has since been deleted from Barton's account.. The Washington Post's Dave Weigel quoted a portion of the piece.

Rep. Joe Barton of Texas broke an iron law of Washington last week. He described the elephant in the room that no one was supposed to see. In this case, it was the strong-arming Obama & Co. applied to BP to get it to "voluntarily" set up a $20 billion fund to compensate Gulf citizens adversely affected by the oil spill. Barton used the inelegant term, "shakedown." He was promptly made to eat humble pie by his party's Congressional leaders, fearful that if they didn't clamp down, the Democrats would use it to tie the entire party to an unpopular company.

The op-ed Peter Hannaford goes on to blame Obama, Congressional Democrats and Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac for the housing crisis. Fannie and Freddie were horribly run companies but were too small to create the crisis. Banks were losing money off of credit default swaps. The banks couldn't cover mortgages so the institutions moved the mortgages to security accounts. The terrible irony was these security accounts were insured by credit default swaps. We can also take in rising unemployment and homes appraised at over their values as factors into the housing crisis. Fannie and Freddie were bad but not big enough to sink the entire housing market.

The rest of Hannaford's op-ed is how dare Obama pick on poor BP.

Mr. Obama's attorney general had already taken the unusual step of publicly announcing in advance a criminal investigation of the oil spill. This built pressure on BP, as did the concerted effort by everyone in the administration with access to a microphone to demonize it, as if it had deliberately caused the Deepwater Horizon rig to explode and unleash a flow of oil from the sea bed.

BP's attempted to drill for oil with cheap equipment. In 2005, 15 BP workers were killed in an explosion. The reason for the explosion was BP failing to follow safety guidelines. More recently, BP spilled oil into Alaska's North Slope. BP has other accidents and safety violations. Who does Hannaford think is to blame for this? Obama and pesky government regulations.