More finger-pointing and Taxi Driver style “listen up, punk” stuff is emanating from the Oval Office. But although he told a major network news anchor that BP’s CEO Tony Hayward “wouldn’t be working for me any more”, the Prezz has in real life never been a trigger-happy kind of corporate. This is mainly because he’s never had a corporate job of any kind – like Blair, Brown, Sarkozy, Rompuy and all the rest of the people who always know better.

However, as it is now emerging that the BP oil spill is twice what anyone realised, one wonders how the Administration’s surveillance of oil-leak capping was so replete with fine detail to rubbish BP’s claims….and yet the size thing evaded those cameras.

Perhaps we should stop calling the Anglo-Saxon Atlantic bond The Special Relationship, and move on to dubbing it The Dysfunctionally Abusive Family – I don’t know. But what’s becoming clear as events unravel is that Obama wan Kanobe has messed up badly from Day One on the Gulf spill. The Government’s own facilities for either stoppage or cleanup look pretty woeful, and having granted the drilling rights in the first place, due diligence always lies with the folks granting the rights.

Making BP look incompetent and foolhardy is therefore counter-productive on almost every level. Calling it ‘British’ Petroleum is just plain rude, as it isn’t the company’s name any more. But this is minor-league stuff compared to the President’s pledge of aid to Gaza. In brief, there are four reasons for that judgement:

1. The Gaza blockade has been going on for quite some time. Giving the aid now looks like guilty blood money.
2. Sorry to keep boffing on about this, but really – somebody needs to brief President Obama on Arabs and how they think. This will play in Iran as yet more evidence of the Infidel’s spineless and hypocritical obeisance to the almighty Allah.
3. It’s rewarding terrorist spin, pure and simple: ‘we run the blockade, we get Satan’s money: great, let’s do more blockade-running.
4. It’s yet another disturbing sign to up the paranoia in Tel Aviv – and likely to increase the power of the hotheads.

When Obama first took office, this column felt the new President’s overtures to Islam were shrewd, as in “I make the overtures, they spit in my face – then I say OK, but at least I tried”. Well, they spat in the President’s face…but he’s still out there making pacific noises.

Clearly, The Slog ascribed far too much guile to Barack Obama. On being told by a senior State Department source last week that the Administration’s Mid-East strategy is to “pull Iran back into the real world” I thought it was a wind-up. But seemingly not.

US foreign policy at the moment is a shambles of accusatory bellicosity, poor extrapolation from intelligence, and then obviously Machiavellian attempts at ‘giving comfort’ when that doesn’t work: the approach to Chinese revaluation of the Yuan is perhaps the best example.

Personally, I don’t know enough to be sure where the real blame lies for this. But I do know the desk where the buck stops. More and more money is going on the ‘Obama is a jerk’ outcome. The ball is now in his court. Without more direction and substance – and soon – President Obama is heading for Jimmy Carter status.