I should add another reason: what the heck does Obama have to contribute? It is obvious that British Petroleum has an interest in capping the well, partly to reclaim what is clearly an abundant source of oil, and mostly to avoid the political crucifixion they are about to endure. (More on that below.) So if they haven't done it yet, that's because it is a very difficult engineering task.

But Barack Obama is not an engineer. Far from it. From what I can tell, he doesn't even know much about his own field (the law). And by all indications, he is a scientific and technological illiterate—which is fine, so long as he knows enough to get out of the way of the people who know what they're doing. But of course, he doesn't.

Obama's mentality is summed up in a revealing Washington Post report on Obama's supposed private reaction to briefings about the oil spill. The story was leaked, no doubt, to show how strong and "tough" the president is—but it actually makes him look like an ineffectual bully.

[T]o those tasked with keeping the president apprised of the disaster, Obama's clenched jaw is becoming an increasingly familiar sight. During one of those sessions in the Oval Office the first week after the spill, a president who rarely vents his frustration cut his aides short, according to one who was there. "Plug the damn hole," Obama told them.

The hole continues to spew, however, in quantities now thought to be three to five times the 5,000 barrels a day originally estimated.

Funny how reality doesn't respond to presidential orders. The article concludes with this gem of a quote:

"If you could control an oil spill with lawyers and regulation-writers, and by signing papers and obtaining court injunctions...then maybe the US government could do something," said Byron W. King, an energy analyst at Agora Financial. "But really, Uncle Sam has almost no institutional ability to control the oil spill. For that, you need people with technical authority, technical skill, and firms with industrial capabilities."

But Obama has a different idea of what is needed. It was his Secretary of the Interior, Ken Salazar, who named the administration's policy toward the oil spill and toward the efforts made by British Petroleum: "We will keep our boot on their neck until the job gets done."

This is all that Obama has to offer as his intervention. He can't offer a single idea about how to "plug the damn hole," just an imperious order that it be done, somehow, by someone—and the threat of a boot on their neck if they don't succeed.

Thus, we see the news that the administration—desperate to be seen as doing something—has done the only thing it can do: threatened the use of government force against anyone and everyone associated with the failed oil well.

The headline of the article below is admirably exact when it says that the administration has launched a criminal probe of the oil slick. That'll show it! Obama has been compared to King Canute for his preposterous claim that his election would be the moment when we stopped the rise of the oceans. But Canute knew that he couldn't stop the tides. Obama reminds me more of Xerxes, the Persian king who ordered the sea to be flogged as punishment for the failure of his bridge across the Hellespont. Except that instead of the lash, Obama sends lawyers.

Amazingly, this has done nothing to clean up the oil spill. But it has crashed the stock of British Petroleum and dragged down the stock market by reviving the fear of arbitrary government action—the fear of Obama's boot on our necks.