Republican apologizes to all those nice people in charge of BP

The Huffington Post's Sam Stein reports that Republican Congressman Joe Barton apologized to BP CEO Tony Hayward today for all the trouble the United States has put him through lately:

I'm ashamed of what happened in the White House yesterday. I think it is a tragedy in the first proportion that a private corporation can be subjected to what I would characterize as a shakedown -- in this case a $20 billion shakedown -- with the attorney general of the United States, who is legitimately conducting a criminal investigation and has every right to do so to protect the American people, participating in what amounts to a $20 billion slush fund that's unprecedented in our nation's history, which has no legal standing, which I think sets a terrible precedent for our nation's future. I'm only speaking for myself. I'm not speaking for anyone else, but I apologize. I do not want to live in a county where anytime a citizen or a corporation does something that is legitimately wrong, [it is] subject to some sort of political pressure that, again, in my words, amounts to a shakedown. 

So what we have here is an American Congressman apologizing to BP rather than the other way around. The absurdity of this is mind-boggling.

Let's be clear about what Barton is saying. To shake someone down is to commit extortion. And to extort someone is "to obtain from a person by force, intimidation, or undue or illegal power." A slush fund is defined as "a fund for bribing public officials or carrying on corruptive propaganda" and "an unregulated fund often used for illicit purposes." Is paying reparations to Gulf Coast residents harmed by the spill "illicit"? Does Barton have evidence that a crime has been committed? Or is he making some lame attempt to blunt the potential political windfall for the president of actually holding BP accountable for their horrific, almost unimaginable mess in the Gulf?

Even if we grant that the escrow account "has no legal standing," it doesn't follow that it is illegal. (I'm not a lawyer, by the way.) There would be nothing wrong, for example, with the president reminding BP of its moral obligation to make those harmed by the spill whole again, or as whole as is possible. There would be nothing wrong with reminding BP that it is in their own long-term self-interest to do that. It seems to me that persuading BP to agree to the escrow account is akin to settling out of court. If Barton has his way, however, my neighbor and I would have to get the authorities involved if she ran over my dog; it would be wrong of us to handle it on our own.

What would Barton say if I, acting as a private citizen, were caught somehow spewing 24 barrels of oil into the Gulf of Mexico every minute, and the president had hauled me into his office and demanded that I make everyone affected whole? I doubt that he would be apologizing to me. I haven't given him any campaign contributions, after all. Could all the money Barton has received from oil and gas have something to do with this? Who at BP has he been sleeping with?

Not only are Republicans embarrassing themselves by kowtowing to BP, their own party can't seem to agree on how to address the problem. (To be fair, Rep. John Boehner appears to have distanced himself from Barton's apology.) We are told in the same story that Rep. Tom Price has written, "These actions are emblematic of a politicization of our economy that has been borne out of this Administration's drive for greater power and control." And yet Minority Whip Eric Cantor seems to think that the president ought to plug the leak himself:

I don't want to, nor does anybody want to pile on the president, but what people need right now is leadership. And this speech just did not demonstrate that there is a plan to help the people right now who need it most. . . . We've got a real environmental catastrophe right now, and there is no demonstrative thing to point to where this president says, "We've got a plan. We're going to get it done." 

When reminded about the escrow account, Cantor said:

What we did not hear last night . . . is a fix to the problem. . . . Why isn't the president calling our allies, calling sources that he's got to go in and bring the necessary equipment in place to do everything we can to stave off this environmental disaster of epic proportions?

Well, which is it, then? Is the president obligated to take greater control of this thing as Cantor suggests, or would that be wrong, as Price claims? Whatever he does, the Republicans aren't going to like it. There is no way for Obama to win, because it is so important to Republicans that they themselves win in November.

This just in: Sen. John Cornyn says that he shares Barton's concerns about the escrow account. "I think it's comforting to know that there will be resources set aside and available to pay for legitimate claims," but "this has really become a political issue for the President and he's trying to deal with it by showing how tough he's being against BP." So perhaps it's good for the president to be tough against BP, as long as he's not showing how tough he's being against BP? Let us know when the results from the focus group are in, Big Bad John.



And take off that fucking cowboy hat, poseur.

(Oh, and by the way, responsibility-free talkers and bloggers, support for the new health care reform bill has hit a record high. Assholes.)

You Can't Have It Both Ways

At the blog Be John Galt (no, thanks), Ayn Rand disciple bc3b claims that BP had been contemplating the top kill maneuver as early as May 9, but didn't attempt it until now because President Obama was playing golf.  No, I am not making this up.  (bc3b also confuses the top kill maneuver with the junk shot manuever, but that's another matter.  Here's some help for you, bc3b, if you're interested.)

Andrew Corsello does a fine job of stating what I think about Ayn Rand.  My negative feelings about her have been more intense lately, since we can blame what Corsello calls Ayn Rand Assholes, or ARA's, for the last few years of economic trauma:

Thanks to them, the Rand Experience is no longer limited to those who have read the books. It's metastasized. You, me, all of us, we're living it. Because it's the ARA Army of antigovernment-antiregulation puritans who have spent the past three decades gleefully pulling the cooling rods out of the American economy. For a while, it got very big and very hot. Then it popped. And now the rest of us have to spend the next decade scaling the slippery slopes of the huge suppurative crater that was left behind.  

Anyway, some pack of adolescent Rand disciples is trying to find a way to criticize Obama for the screw-ups of BP, and this is the shit they come up with.  Hey, bc3b, why don't you take the advice of your hero and check your premises?

Given the intimate relationship between the previous administration and oil companies, perhaps bc3b might be forgiven for thinking that Obama is an oil company executive.  But he's not, so you can't have that particular premise, bc3b.

Ayn Rand called her "philosophy" objectivism.  Academic philosophers have virtually no respect for Rand or objectivism.  Now, I'm wondering why bc3b, who I assume is an objectivist, would blame Obama, a public official, for the oil spill in the Gulf, when objectivists believe that government regulation of the private sector is wrong.  To assume that Obama is responsible for this mess is to believe that government ought to regulate and control business.  I have no problem with that premise, but you can't have that one, bc3b, because you are a stinking objectivist.

So why would bc3b and Republicans in general want to hold Obama responsible for BP's mess?  Because they all believe that the private sector can do no wrong, and that government is responsible for everything that ails us.  Remember the health care reform debate?  Republicans like Rep. Mike Pence warned against a "government takeover" of health care:

Folks know a government-run option would result in tens of millions losing insurance they have with their employer now and millions of Americans losing their jobs, and the idea now that piling on top of all that big government takeover of health care are going to be tax increases on businesses and employees is just astonishing. . . . Republicans are coming together around conservative values. We need the American people to ride to the rescue. We can stop this government takeover of health care, and we request demand this Congress take action that will get this economy moving again.

Months later, Pence is changing his tune. "The American people deserve to know why the administration was slow to respond, why necessary equipment was not immediately on hand in the area and why the president did not fully deploy Cabinet-level federal officials" to the Gulf Coast until April 30, Pence recently said.

Pence wants government out of the health care business, but he wants government all over the oil business.  Why?  Republicans can be counted on to defend the interests of big business every time, and the little guy can go fuck off and die (literally).  So Pence and the rest of the Republicans did everything they could to kill health care reform, since they saw it as antithetical to the interests of the health care corporations and their profits.  Now they're defending BP by trying to blame their royal screw-up on President Obama, since bad PR for BP is antithetical to the interests of oil companies and their profits.

And let there be no doubt: this catastrophe in the Gulf is BP's fault.  According to the Associated Press, "Dozens of witness statements obtained by The Associated Press show a combination of equipment failure and a deference to the chain of command impeded the system that should have stopped the gusher before it became an environmental disaster."  And that's not Obama's fault.

In addition, President Obama's response to this catastrophe cannot be compared to President Bush's response to Hurricane Katrina, no matter what Republicans looking for a political advantage say.  According to the Associated Press,

The Gulf region, ravaged five years earlier by Hurricane Katrina, was on the verge of a second ecological disaster. Would there be a repeat of the bureaucratic bungling that marked President George W. Bush's response to the hurricane?

While the Obama administration has faced second-guessing about the speed and effectiveness of some of its actions, a narrative pieced together by The Associated Press, based on documents, interviews and public statements, shows little resemblance to Katrina in either the characterization of the threat or the federal government's response.

Lemme guess, Republican, the reporting of the Associated Press suffers from liberal bias, right?

And if you stop and think about it, the differences between Katrina and BP are stark.  Government is responsible for responding to natural disasters like Katrina, and government was responsible for the construction and maintenance of the levees protecting New Orleans from Lake Pontchartrain.  BP is responsible for the man-made disaster in the Gulf that BP itself caused, and BP is also responsible for cleaning up its own mess.

Some Republicans and adolescent objectivist bloggers might want to blame the catastrophe on lax government regulation.  Consider the following lead paragraphs of an Associated Press story:

At a 2005 workshop, a senior official in the U.S. government's Minerals Management Service raised concerns about ultra-deepwater drilling and included the bullet point, "Few or no regulations or standards." Within two years, Jim Grant left his post as chief of staff of the government's Gulf of Mexico region to take a job with BP PLC – one of the companies his former agency regulated in its oversight of offshore drilling.

Grant's change is one example of the revolving door between the Interior Department's MMS and the oil industry, which increasingly has the attention of Congress, the Obama administration and watchdog groups after the disastrous BP oil spill at an ultra-deepwater rig in the Gulf of Mexico.

Just this week, a government report said drilling regulators have been so close to the industry they've been accepting gifts from oil and gas companies and even negotiating to go work for them.

For someone like me, this is disturbing.  But haven't Republicans and ARA's wanted to deregulate the private sector and get government off the backs of corporations so that they could make more money?  Sorry, assholes: you can't on the one hand insist on deregulation, and then fault Obama for regulatory failure.

Republicans like former FEMA "director" Michael Brown have even gone so far as to claim that the spill was a conspiracy on the part of Obama to provide an excuse to reestablish the ban on offshore oil drilling.  Sorry, Brownie, but that just reeks of desperation and stupidity.

So, what have we learned?

John Galt can go fuck himself.  

Rush Limbaugh: BP's best friend

This morning, I briefly listened to Rush Limbaugh, one of the original loudmouthed right-wing clowns. And Limbaugh was discussing the BP catastrophe. (By the way, just in case you are wondering, Limbaugh has asserted that the dangers of the spill have been overstated.)  And he somewhat predictably blamed the spill on "environmentalist wackos." (I believe that is the phrase he used.) You see, if it weren't for environmentalists, oil companies would be able to drill in shallow water, closer to the shore, where a catastrophe like the one we're witnessing could have been easily avoided. Since the law does not allow for that, the oil companies must drill in far deeper water, for us!

Hey Rush, as Mom used to tell me, you don't have to do anything but die and pay taxes, you bastard.

And another thing, Rush: is it really accurate to blame this spill on environmentalists?  Let's think about this, you bastard. Government can't do anything right. Isn't that so? If you want anything done right, you have to hand it over to the private sector, and just get out of their way. Isn't that right? Surely even a prescription drug addict such as yourself can see that. Now, here's the problem. First, you can't say on the one hand that oil production ought to be left to the private sector but then on the other hand absolve them of any responsibility if things go wrong. Second, this whole BP spill is yet more proof that the private sector can fuck something up just as badly as government can, if not worse.  Handing everything over to the private sector is not going to solve all of our problems.  Take your copy of Atlas Shrugged to the recycling center and grow up, asshole.

And finally, it seems to me that if anyone is ultimately responsible for this catastrophe, it's people like you, Rush, and all those Republicans who have fought against raising automobile fuel efficiency standards.  You see, had we been able to make car companies produce more fuel-efficient cars, we might not have needed BP to drill in the deep Gulf water to get oil for our ridiculous-looking gargantuan trucks and SUV's.  So actually, the environmentalists are our friends since they support more fuel-efficient automobiles, you repulsive bastard.

Limbaugh's rant against environmentalists came in a segment in which Limbaugh claimed that Obama has been so slow to respond to the catastrophe because he has no idea what to do, as if Obama is somehow responsible for this mess.  How do the folks on the right complain about government regulation on the one hand, and then also complain when the government is too slow to clean up a corporation's mess?  Isn't that BP's job? Or is is that BP can't handle the responsibility and the Nanny State has to come save the day? Oh, I see how it is now: privatize the profits, socialize the catastrophe.