This is actually an old story, in terms of the economic, ecological and public relations carnage inflicted on the southern states of the US, but politically it's just starting to get interesting. For those who have been living on Mars for the last couple of months, a rig explosion in the Gulf of Mexcio has resulted in the leakage of hundreds of thousands of barrels of oil into the water, killing fish and shrimp, wrecking the economy of Louisiana and other states, destroying wildlife and ruining the tourist economy of the affected areas.
What makes this interest is that, despite the unresolved impacts of American firms such as Union Carbide and Eli Lilly, the involvement of US oil giant Halliburton and that of an American drilling firm (who must be at least partly culpable for the catastrophe), lame duck President Barack Obama, who promised so much and has delivered so little has decided that all the blame, all the vitreol (and all the financial loss) must be placed on the oil company whose pipeline ruptured, BP.
BP used to be British Petroleum, as Saint Barack keeps reminding his public. Of course, Barack hates us - we have always known this - so the chance to deflect attention from his own uselessness to his hated Brits was too good to pass up. He tells us his father was tortured by the British in Kenya, but then he told us he was born in Hawaii, and that might not be true, either. His behaviour towards Gordon Brown was so snubbish that I almost felt sorry for Useless Gordy. And rather than cultivate the alleged "Special Relationship" (a figment of the imagination of UK politicians with an eye on the US after-dinner speaking circuit), he has sought to build bridges with Europe, Russia and, er, the Islamic world. Thank God for Hillary Clinton's injection of credibility into Saint Barack's pisspoor foreign policy.
While the Americans are baying for BP's blood (or oil) let's take a step back from this. Despite the British media's insistence that 97% of Americans are in favour of nuking London tomorrow (a low figure compared to 98.4% in Yorkshire and 100% in Scotland), you have to Google pretty hard to find anti-British rhetoric linked to the BP crisis. And America's (but not Saint Barack's) anger towards BP is fully justified. Time (and enquiries) will eventually tell whether BP deserves all the blame.
