BP Glee

It's been a busy week and I've been in an especially foul mood as of late which results in thankfully slow going here in Yellow Blog land. So instead of afflicting you with the collection of links and rants about this week in Obama vs BP vs Louisiana I had been fouling around with I'll just share the two most grating items from this week in order to convey some sense of my personal state of mind. After which I can retreat to my corner for the rest of the day or until I shrug it off.

I'm pretty pissed at Joe Barton. Yeah, like a lot of people I'm offended at the perverted priorities revealed in his apology to BP CEO Tony Hayward for what he termed President Obama's "shakedown" of the company to establish a $20 billion escrow fund to benefit victims of the oil disaster. I'm particularly upset over it because I understand that Barton's comment and subsequent apology for it wasn't just some stupid gaffe and retraction. It was a well-developed reactionary talking point repeated by numerous commentators and politicians throughout the week and one that isn't going away any time soon. I have no doubt that Barton floated it that morning with the intent of getting it to lead the evening news. Barton subsequently apologized to us for our "misconstruing" his remarks. Not only is the non-apology wormy on its face but it's also more an affirmation than an apology. At the end of the day, Barton's message made the paper. In the long run, the clever way it was presented will give it legs. The stage direction conveys to us that Barton spoke his mind, it shocked sensitive people, and he was forced to retract it but all the decent hard working folk in the target audience will eventually agree he was kind of right. Americans love to hate victims and poor people who appear to be getting away with something. Watch what happens.

But all of that is pretty standard American politics. It's annoying but it isn't the aspect of the Barton comment that left me feeling as suicidal as I am at the end of this week. What's really gotten under my skin is that Barton's remark left this song in my head for three days.



Today is Father's Day. Mostly what this means is that I sacrificed a shockingly large chunk of my afternoon yesterday to the pursuit of one non-cheesy greeting card. At one point in my life, people made generic cards with perhaps a picture on them but no stupid canned sappy or "humorous" message. This is no longer the case. In fact it's getting more and more difficult to find one that doesn't present the cheesy stupid message in audio form. I don't know why we go to such great technological lengths to say to one another, "Smile, infant. Here is some insincere pablum I purchased." Anyway I was hoping to find something as far away from that as could be hoped for which took waay longer than I had hoped for. My mood went from mild annoyance to all-out panic when the opening strains of Styx's "Come Sail Away" wafted out over the Walgreens sound system. I grabbed a card with a random enough photo of a big fish on it and made for the check-out counter. Unfortunately the Walgreens exit procedure is nearly as complicated as figuring out a World Cup standings tie-break. I had to stand there and listen to the whole damn song in line.

And all of that is pretty bad but the part of this story that ruined my mood and makes me want to wade into the oil seas off of Grand Isle and drown myself, is that the moment I got out to the car and flipped on the radio, here's what was being discussed.

BP Chief Yachts While Gulf Oil Spill Burns


Once again, it's not the fact of the predictable arrogance of the empowered abusers that has me out of sorts. It's the freaking soundtrack.