Listening to President Obama's press conference about the Gulf oil spill, I found myself actually relating to what he was saying, seeing things through his eyes and feeling some real sympathy for him. The more I thought about it, the more I wanted to cut the little guy some slack.

When he said that there has never before been a disaster like this oil spill [leaving aside the fact that there actually have been worse ones], and that therefore there was no precedent to guide him in how to deal with it, I realized that there was nothing in his studies or his life experience to prepare him for such a thing.

After all, none of the people who influenced or inspired him was ever confronted with a catastrophic oil spill.

Saul Alinsky didn't devote a single chapter of "Rules for Radicals" to catastrophic oil spills. Neither Marx nor Lenin nor Trotsky ever had such a calamity thrust upon him. Neither Stalin nor Mussolini ever encountered such a challenge. Even Dr. Goebbels, that unequaled (well, until now) master of propaganda, never had to face an environmentally disastrous oil spill.

Needless to say, Chairman Mao, Pol Pot, Fidel Castro, Robert Mugabe, Louis Farrakhan and Rev. Jeremiah Wright never had to deal with an oil spill.

And there's certainly no mention of any such thing in the Most Holy Qur'an; not a single sura.

So one can't really blame poor Barack for seeming to not know anything about oil spills. In this particular case, he doesn't have a single model to follow.