Aberration

The Times reports that oil executives have told a House panel investigating the Deepwater Horizon spill that the disaster is an aberration—“a rare event their companies are not likely to repeat.”

They actually said that? No way. Why wouldn’t they tell Congress that such accidents are inevitable and that no one can possibly predict when another one will occur?

(Later, behind closed doors, I’m sure the executives also admitted that their companies are devoted to high profits and they routinely trade off safety considerations in order to squeeze every possible dollar out of drilling operations whenever possible.)

Why does the government even hold these hearings? It’s not like some new information is going to emerge whereby these guys are going to come clean on all the corners they cut and the myriad ways in which our environment has been and will be further devastated by their actions and inactions.

I suppose the public flogging is a good thing; it’s fun to see sleazebags in expensive suits squirm a bit, but it seems to me that time and effort would be better spent in having the executives out there in hazmats suits scooping up tar balls.

Then, when they got nice and sticky, we could cover them in feathers and ride them out of town on a rail.

I guess I’m just getting cynical about the progress of things; by now, you’d think that the oil leak would have been plugged and the overall focus could be on the clean-up. Consequently, here’s my thought of the day: how about we start by jamming Tony Hayward into the hole; if that doesn’t work, we just go ahead and continuing inserting one BP executive after another into the gusher is capped. Of course, we’ll do it humanely: every oil baron who is used, will have just as much a chance of survival as the nearby marine life.

And if any don’t make it, no worries: it’s just an aberration.