Obama is unfair to BP

This morning NPR told me that Tony Hayward, CEO of BP, has had it with the negative publicity and the way the US Government has been dumping on his company. Tony Hayward said, with recording machines running, “I want my life back.”

Nobody would ever put Diogenes in the position of top management of a big company. As my friend Mark (who does run a company) tells me, I just don’t have the skills. But even a person of moderate intelligence and experience can see, this is a call for help. It is time today for the BP Board of Trustees (or whatever they have in London) to fire Tony Hayward and put the poor bastard out of misery.

It is totally unfair for the Obama administration to portray that the situation is totally the fault of BP.
To be fair to Mr. Obama, BP does deserve over 90% of the blame. When BP says that the US Government told them it is OK to do business the way they do it, that is true. The Government told them it is OK, when Spencer Abraham was Energy Secretary, when Dick Cheney was The Man in energy policy. The Government probably deserves 10% of the blame – and we should be talking about who did it. Diogenes is old enough to remember the Republicans shouting “Who Lost China?” Well, the answer they gave was that Truman lost China, but in reality, Chiang Kai-Shek lost it. Those of us with strong voices should be shouting now, “Who Lost The Gulf?” The answer is, BP did it, and they had as accomplices the Bush Administration and the Republican majorities in the House and the Senate. Some of the credit for this debacle rests with the 41 members of the Senate who are willing to filibuster any effort to control the big oil companies.

Susan Collins, Olympia Snowe, Scott Brown, I am talking to you.
Each of you has the ability to help to rectify the situation, and you are not doing it. Mr.Obama has made appointments to Homeland Security that have been filibustered in the Senate.
You three are not there to help. You are exactly as culpable as Mr. Cheney and Mr. McConnell.

In whining that the Government let them act as they did, BP forget to mention that they certified under penalty of perjury, that they had a disaster plan, a well thought out program just in case a very bad thing happened. BP did not have such a plan. When they said everything is under control, they knew it was not. When they said the oil spill was minimal, they knew it was not. Stephen Chu, the Energy Secretary, says that he offered to bring a team to meet with BP about the spill. BP told him it’s too complicated you would not understand. Dr. Chu says that he told them that he won the Nobel Prize for his work in Plasma Physics, and oil drilling is probably not more complicated than Plasma Phsyics.

The Republican critics of Mr. Obama, who say this is Obama’s Kristina, are wrong on the facts.
They don’t know about why the spill occurred. They are not willing to let the Government look in to see about remediation. They are only willing to howl and to pretend that the BP Oil Spill was caused by Presuidenty Obama, because it happened on his watch. The Oil Spill is Bush’s Kristina. Yes, the BP spill as also Bush’s Kristina.

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Tags: BP Oil Spill Obama McConnell Snowe