Petro Chutzpah vs. an "Amateur" Video

Watch this amateur video of an aerial view of the mess in the gulf narrated by an Alabama resident.

Speaks for itself.

So do the interviews that BP CEO Tony Hayward has now granted to the BBC and Guardian.

Speaking with the "Beeb," Hayward rejected calls for a ban against off-shore oil drilling and then suggested this howler.

"I don't believe it should [result in a ban], in the same way as Apollo 13 did not stop the space program nor have serious airline accidents from time to time stopped people flying."

Apollo 13?

I'll let this good professor take the lectern in response:

"Except that greedily destroying the environment with offshore petroleum drilling is not actually very much like flying to the moon. And flying to the moon, for all the pollution it causes on the way up to the stratosphere, won't destroy the earth. And the problems on Apollo 13, when the three astronauts barely got back to earth alive, weren't anything like the gargantuan viscous black monster that Hayward's incompetence has unleashed on the Gulf coast. And finally, for some posh arrogant foreign twit to invoke the heroism of James A. Lovell, Jack Swigert, and Fred Haise to excuse the greatest corporate SNAFU of the twenty-first century just about makes my blood boil."

To quote the great Smokey Robinson, I'll second that emotion.

But Hayward wasn't finished. The interview he granted to the Guardian featured this remarkably tone-deaf assertion:

""The Gulf of Mexico is a very big ocean. The amount of volume of oil and dispersant we are putting into it is tiny in relation to the total water volume."

A very big ocean?

The Guardian reporter described Hayward's demeanor during the interview as being very "bullish." Here's your Saturday puzzle, boys and girls: Transpose that word's last three letters and add a missing "t"and you have a more fitting description.

Meanwhile, this continues.