I watched some of the posturing about BP CEO Tony Hayward this afternoon, and based on that performance my answer would have to be a resounding "NO". At least not if it meant that if we kept Congress, we'd have to keep the parade of morons currently there. That bunch of people I saw this afternoon were scary; there wasn't enough intellectual firepower up there to burn calories. The performance, the fake concern, the sarcasm, the posturing, the begging for Hayward to resign, was pathetic.
If none of those people aren't already sterile, we should probably make it a requirement for public office. After all, we spay and neuter house cats, so why not Congresscritters? But I digress...
Let's get something straight: Mr. Hayward did himself no good today, either. His company, which is already on my List of 10,000-Least-Favorite-Things-After-Ebola, is in deeper shit than I might have thought possible. If the e-mails that the Congresscritters were jabbering about today are any indication -- e-mails which contain complaints about safety from members of the drilling team, hints about cost-cutting, and internal memos which paint a picture of a company that was in total disarray, where the executives don't know what the workforce does, where the line-managers seem to be cowboys, and this was before the disaster -- are anything close to true, BP will probably cease to exist.
And that is as it should be; that's the Free Market at work. Companies that fuck up go out of business, it's just a shame that Congress can only remember that when they have a convenient foreign whipping boy willing to be shaken down to the tune of $20 billion just to keep the lawyers at bay (for now), and conveniently forgot it when Citibank, General Motors or AIG -- whose executives contributed to the campaign coffers of every Congressional Retard on the Hill -- were at the helm of their own disasters.
But don't get the idea in your head that Congress, by exposing BP's internal e-mails and hectoring Hayward with questions they knew he wasn't going to answer was actually doing anything that will prevent another Gulf Oil Spill, plug the damned hole, or clean up a solitary shoreline.
They just kept asking Hayward questions in an attempt to get something on record with which to clobber him later on. It's an old lawyer's trick, and it's how they eventually got Martha Stewart, you know. They want to lock Hayward into a story so that when the facts eventually do come out (especially the ones that show the government asleep at the switch, or which catch the regulatory agencies at their usual dumb-as-dogshit best), they'll be able to dance around those inconvenient revelations by hammering Hayward over "changes in his story".
BP is not off the hook, as far as I'm concerned, but the dog-and-pony show these last few days with the oil industry being beaten up in the public square so that complete and utter dingleberries can look "concerned" and "tough" and "in command", is an even sadder sight than seabirds slathered in crude oil.
Especially that asshat Joseph Cao, who started all that stuff about hara-kiri. If I remember correctly, Cao was one of the republican votes for ObamaCare, so maybe he'd care to demonstrate the proper technique for the rest of us? At least it would spare us his fake sanctimony and transparent grandstanding. Incidentally, Cao is Vietnamese, I think, and hara-kiri (more properly called "seppaku") is Japanese. Vietnamese don't kill themselves: they surrender to the nearest communists they can find and then take to rickety boats to save their worthless asses...at least the ones who eventually grow up to be Congressmen, that is. Cao is the Republican Party's answer to Anthony Weiner.
I know we have to keep a Congress, if only because if we didn't have one the President of the United States would become a dictator...oh, wait, that's already happened...but do we have to keep this one, and give them excuses to stage trials, asking questions (written by aides who did some actual research) of people who know even less than they do?
After that disgusting display, I'm of the mind that all 535 members of both Houses would be more useful if they stopped shovelling their usual nonsense, and hit a Gulf Coast beach to shovel tar balls, instead.
Certainly, BP should be punished for whatever it has done, or failed to do. The time for that, however, will be after they manage to plug the hole in the Gulf and start the cleanup in earnest, because there is no other entity at present who can do either. The Federal Government is inept, and it's hands are tied by bureaucratic bullshit, legalities, and the fact that public employees don't work very hard, or display much initiative. So, lay off BP, especially with the lawyer's tricks and the third-degree bullshit, until they've done what you need them to do.
The fucking lawsuits can wait.
But then I guess if there weren't this Show Trials, some people (mostly the Press, which is an even bigger crowd of idiots than Congress) would ask "where's the government in all this?", and those jerkoffs on Capitol Hill would have no answer. At least now they can claim to have "grilled Tony Hayward and asked him tough questions on the record...", which at least keep them occupied long enough so that they weren't trying to figure out how to tax us to pay for penile implants for illegal aliens.
Unfortunately, it doesn't stop the leak, or clean up one drop of oil. How much you wanna bet that every one of those flapping rectums will make certain the video of today's puppet show appears in their campaign commercials this fall, though?
BP can't plug the hole fast enough, and 2012 can't come soon enough.
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