My take:
"The White House was accused today of spinning a government scientific report into the amount of oil left in the Gulf of Mexico from the BP spill which had officials declaring that the vast majority of the oil had been removed."
Well, if they said the vast majority was "removed", thats just not true, it wasn't removed. It was degraded by natural forces into its constituents, which are common and much less dangerous substances. This occurs naturally, but the use of dispersents greatly accelerated the process, i.e. it made the oil more biodegradable. The process is likely not over, either. It would normally take decades for this to occur naturally. With dispersents, it's probably more like a few months, but we've only had weeks for some of the oil that came out late in the spill. So yeah, there's still oil being eaten by microbes throughout the water column. But unlike some of the things you read, it isn't all just laying there on the bottom.
Further, onshore, such as the marshes and mud flats, there's still surface oil. The whole process just doesn't work as well in shallow, flat water as it does in deep, agitated water. And the dispersents are still out there too, they'll take a few months to break down as well, but they are biodegradable.
And while the microbes are feasting on oil and dispersent, they're using oxygen, in an environment thats always been oxygen poor due to the Mississippi. So the already existing dead zones on the ocean floor are almost certainly expanding. And of all those dead fish, I'm sure some died of toxification, but more probably died of suffocation, or if their food supply is out of reach or destroyed, starvation. For instance, the one article showed a school of rays swimming near the surface. Why? Well, they're normal habitat, the bottom, is uninhabitable because of lack of oxygen, and their bottom dwelling food supply either perished or moved. They're on the surface to breath.
So I do see a political danger in saying "all is well" when the reality is "things are still very very bad, but not as bad as they could have been and the situation is improving." Plus, even when all the oil and dispersents are gone, recovery from the economic aspect of the disaster will linger, and it'll take some time to get the fishery to fully recover. Those people down there have lost their jobs and livelihoods, and they don't look to come back anytime soon. The last thing they want to see is the president telling the rest of the country that everything is peachy now and that everyone can forget about the gulf.
