Captains Uncourageous

By Sniffles

For those of you who think you've seen Dick Cheney's fingerprints all over the BP oil spill, you probably weren't surprised if you also saw them all over BP CEO Tony Hayward's Congressional testimony yesterday.

Arrogant, evasive, uncooperative, disdainful... Yep, except for his slight Cockney accent, Hayward was a dead ringer for The Worst Person Who's Ever Lived (If Indeed He Were a Person). Maybe Tony thought he could skate through on his pink-cheeked resemblance to Freddie Bartholomew, but his inner Cheney kept coming out.

And why not? After all, about three weeks ago BP hired Cheney's former campaign spokesperson, Anne Womack-Kolton, to handle its American PR effort. Birds of a feather, and all that. It shows.

Here's the deal: The three rules of crisis communications are 1) regret, 2) reform and 3) restitution. BP was obscenely late — and incredibly insincere — about expressing regret. And Hayward's testimony made it clear that there's been no hint of reform; this disaster could happen again at any one of its other oil wells. As for restitution, well, that's laughable. It had to be dragged out of them, to the tune of $20 billion, by an angry citizenry and a determined President Obama.

Given this record of failure, what else could we expect? We cats just wish that more journalists would hammer the BP-Cheney connection home to their readers and viewers. In fact, half the effort that they expended on Monica Lewinsky, Michael Jackson and Chandra Levy would come in handy right now.