Arrughh! Make Them Stop

I don't know which is more painful, watching images of oil and gas spewing out of that devil vent in the Gulf of Mexico or listening to the incessant advice and rants from the knuckleheads who haven't a clue about deep sea drilling and even less what to do about a wellhead blowout.

Of course, I know it's the leak. It may ravage for decades the way of life and the fragile ecosystems in that wonderful and still convalescing region. Still --

I, and probably 99.9 percent of the population, don't know diddly-squat about how to solve this so I will not presume to offer pseudo-technical advice other than this. I think you can be fairly certain the thousands of people calling in to bloviate on talk radio, to say nothing of the breathless hosts who spur them on, are not among the world's leading petroleum engineers.

Commissions, hearings, courts and the inevitable bestsellers will uncover all manner of incompetence, transgressions and malfeasance. Let the blame games begin later. Right now, this catastrophe calls for more sanity and less hyperbole.

For instance, regardless of all the BP bashing, it's reasonable to believe BP is doing everything to shut down that well ASAP. Think about it, even if BP doesn't give a rat's patootie about the coastline, the longer the gusher continues, the less oil will be available to tap for future revenue, the more BP's stock price plunges and the greater will be the compensatory penalties. It's pure survival.

Similarly. President Obama has admitted mistakes were made but accusations this is "Obama's Katrina" are just hooey. Unless, like Katrina, this was an Act of God to which only the government could respond and not a massive corporate screw-up, BP totally owns this mutt. The partisan bellowing is especially tiresome coming from the same "shrink the government" claque that got us into this jam with its anti-regulatory fervor and its abiding devotion to buccaneer capitalism unfettered by government "meddling."

Equally asinine are the unhinged ravings of Democratic operative and major motor mouth James Carville that the administration toss aside BP. To which the national incident commander, Coast Guard Admiral Thad Allen, who by far is the coolest head in this whole donnybrook, responded later to a reporter's question, "(and) replace them with what?" BP is, after all, the one with the expertise and equipment.

Moreover, there is nothing BP would like better than to have the administration step in and take over this fiasco to muddy up the litigation waters when its day of reckoning comes. "Who? us."

So, if you find yourself tempted to spout off on how to fix this and you're not like a Nobel laureate in physics, please constrain yourself.