Saturday was surely Bratish Petroleum day, what with Typhoid Tony Hayward gone a-yachting and all.
Via the New York Times:
BP officials on Saturday scrambled yet again to respond to another public relations challenge when their embattled chief executive, Tony Hayward, spent the day off the coast of England watching his yacht compete in one of the world’s largest races.
But Saturday was also Brutish Petroleum day, as Times columnist Joe Nocera detailed in recalling two other BP catastrophes that occurred before the Cheapwater Horizon meltdown:
. . . BP’s previous disaster on American soil, when oil was discovered leaking from a 16-mile stretch of corroded BP pipeline in Prudhoe Bay in Alaska. And that was just a year after a BP refinery explosion in Texas City, Tex., killed 15 workers and injured hundreds more.
Nocera continues:
The accidents should have been the wake-up call BP needed to change that [shortcut] culture. But the mistakes and negligence that took place on the Deepwater Horizon in the Gulf of Mexico — which are so profound that everyone I spoke to in the oil business found them truly inexplicable — suggest that [BP executives] never did much more than mouth nice-sounding platitudes.
Meanwhile over at the Wall Street Journal, Saturday was Bash President day, with Peggy Noodnik dubbing Barack Obama “A Snakebit President,” and the Journal’s always high-alert editors opining “The President Does a Jones Act.”
Lede:
President Obama has repeatedly said his Administration is doing everything in its power to expedite the oil clean-up and mitigate the damage. But in the two weeks immediately after the spill, 13 foreign governments reached out and offered their assistance. The U.S. response? Thanks, but no thanks.
At least according to Geert Visser, consul general for the Netherlands in Houston. Offers of help have come from other European countries as well, the Journal editorial notes:
The Belgian dredging group DEME says it has offered the U.S. specialized vessels and technology that can help clean up the spill in three to four months compared to the estimated nine months that the U.S. will need. There are only a handful of these vessels in the world, and most of them belong to Dutch and Belgian companies. So why aren’t we calling on them?
Blame it on the protectionist Merchant Marine Act of 1920, also called the Jones Act, that requires ships working in U.S. waters to be built, operated and owned by Americans.
So it’s Obamalove for his “union friends” that’s keeping him from cleaning up the Gulf gaffe. “Presidents can suspend the Jones Act in emergencies, as George W. Bush did after Hurricane Katrina,” the Journal helpfully reminds us.
And we all know how well that worked out.
Campaign Outsider 
“And we all know how well that worked out.”
Well, we are all watching how well the government is doing now in addressing this crisis. Comparisons to the past don’t have much to do with it. The oil spills, our government chills (out).
I don’t think that the public, or the press, is particularly awed by the not-so-sterling performance unfolding before us.
So far, only one responsible party in the government has lost her job. So much for holding people accountable.
Hey, there’s no one to like here, Mudge, and enough blame to go around. Obama deserves plenty of criticism, but too many critics act as if BP is entirely a creature of this White House. The previous one did more than its share to lay the groundwork for this debacle.
I might suggest that if too many critics act as if BP is entirely a creature of this White House, the White House has done a superior job at trying to create that impression. The President’s finger in the air detects that his being seen as in charge as his best political move.
It is noted that while the BP CEO Hayward was watching a yacht race, the President was playing golf on a government-owned golf course and transported there and back at taxpayers expense.
PR gaffe for BP? You bet.
But a similar PR gaffe for the President.
I don’t begrudge the President his relaxation, but he and his administration need to see that they, too, are subject to similar critique. Something about glass houses and thrown stones?
For part of the weekend and Monday morning (06/21…the summer solstice; I celebrated by balancing a box of Eggos on its side) NPR has been reporting that a BP partner called Anadarko Inc (with the emphasis on ‘DARK’) has been criticizing BP for its carelessness on the Gulf drilling platform. However, the CEO of Anadarko, Jim (Can’t) Hackett accepted an award from a group of Oil and Gas Investors for his yeoman work in CUTTING COSTS and INCREASING SHAREHOLDER VALUE! If Anadarko is forced to share some of the bill for the cleanup efforts, it could imperil Anadarko’s future. How’s that “increasing shareholder value” working out now?