Doug Powers skewered Obama’s odious 9/11-BP oil spill analogy the other day — setting the Soros-bots at Media Matters into a fit over “right-wing media misrepresentation” of the remarks.

But it isn’t just “right-wing media” in America taking offense.

From the London Daily Mail:

British families of 9/11 victims described Barack Obama as ‘cruel’ yesterday for comparing the terrorist outrage to the BP oil spill.

The U.S. president said there were ‘echoes’ between the Gulf of Mexico disaster and the Al Qaeda suicide attacks which killed 2,995 people, including 67 Britons.

He said that just as the events of September 11, 2001, had profoundly shaped ‘our view of our vulnerabilities and our foreign policy’, so the oil disaster would shape thinking on the environment and energy for years to come.

Those who lost loved ones when terrorists flew hijacked planes into the Twin Towers of New York’s World Trade Centre said Mr Obama’s remarks were yet another attempt to slur the UK.

Joy Bennett, 66, a mother of two from Amersham in Buckinghamshire whose son Oli, a 29-year-old financial journalist, died, said: ‘It is an unfair parallel and is really a cruel thing to say.

John Podhoretz digs deeper and probes Obama’s 9/11 envy in the NYPost today:

So what on earth could the president have been thinking?

The first possibility is that there is some kind of perverse wish being expressed in these words. They have a wistful quality, as though the president wished he had a different crisis, a more popular crisis, on his hands.

… What the deployment of the 9/11 analogy suggests is that Obama would like to treat BP as though it were al Qaeda, at least rhetorically — a villain for him to confront on behalf of the wounded American people.

That may seem politically shrewd to Obama and his team, but it will have parlous consequences. The analogy muddies and obfuscates.

By comparing an unwanted disaster to a conscious act of war, Obama is adding an improper moral dimension to the effort to clean up the Gulf — a moral reckoning that will make it harder rather than easier to focus on the task of actually plugging the damn hole.

By likening the murder of 3,000 people and the efforts to take out the US government to a series of mistakes that added up to a catastrophe, Obama has defined evil down in a fashion that does immense violence to good sense, good taste and good leadership.

Flashback: Obama in crisis.

Andrew Malcolm at LATimes’ Top of the Ticket goes to town on Obama: Ouch.