BP’s Tony Hayward is getting grilled by a House Investigations Committee over the Gulf Coast oil spill. I ask the simple question – what is this accomplishing?

The Washington Post indicates there was nearly 90 minutes of opening statements by lawmakers before Hayward even began testifying. And what is he really going to say that he hasn’t said before? The greatest slap to the face of stupidity is that congressional lawmakers don’t expect to achieve anything anyway. From a CNN article prior to the hearing, REP Stupak (who is on this warpath to “slice and dice” Hayward) is quoted as having said:

• “So what do you have now? Twenty billion [dollars] in an escrow fund we just established — not to count all your other liability, plus the 11 lives [lost during the explosion]? Is it worth it? Is that the cost of doing business?”
• “At the end of the day, he’s going to put his best foot forward. It’s not going to ring true with me or the American public and we’ve got a mess on our hands, a disaster, a catastrophic disaster for our environment and those people lost their lives. He’s just going to say ’I’m sorry, it’s not going to happen again.’ It’s not good enough. It’s not good enough.”

So just about everyone should realize these hearings are nothing more than publicity grandstanding – so the politicians can look like they’re angry to appeal to constituents. While these politicians (and Obama) continue their photo-op charades of frustration, the cleanup response teams muck around completely uncoordinated with one another. Some want the government to take charge completely while others want the bureaucratic red tape out of the way so they can just get to work. Meanwhile, as everyone continues to point fingers at one another, the oil continues to spread, though it is still only a third of the 1991 Persian Gulf oil spill.