Oily Barbour’s Killer Toothpaste (Edited)

Mississippi’s Boss Hog Haley Bourbor is giving BP CEO Tony Hayward a run for his money for most asinine comment about the catastrophe both of them helped unleash on the Gulf of Mexico.

Upon viewing the first traces of oil from the Macando well blowout to hit the Mississippi coast at Petit Bois Island Wednesday, Barbour remarked:

“By God’s grace, it didn’t come through the pass. I don’t think the island was hurt one iota. (Tar balls) are all on the beach, and they should be easy to clean up with rakes and shovels, then put in bags and hauled off on Gators (four-wheeled ATVs). They’re going to be cleaning areas 400 yards at a time…Once it gets to this…weathered, emulsified, caramel-colored mousse… stage, it’s not poisonous. But if a small animal got coated enough with it, it could smother it. But if you got enough toothpaste on you, you couldn’t breathe.“

A small animal covered in…caramel colored-mouse toothpaste?

Yeah, toothpaste. Maybe like the kind from China that the FDA ordered taken off the nation’s shelves after discovering it contained diethylene glycol, a sweet, syrupy poison.

Meanwhile, Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal has gone from “Drill Baby, Drill” to “Dredge Baby, Dredge”, and back to “Drill Baby, Drill.” Today, he begged the Obama Administration to remove his temporary six month ban on all offshore oil drilling.

And BP continues its Gestapo like policing of news coverage, preventing reporters from taking photos of animals covered in oil.

So toxic has any perception of a “partnership” with BP become that the Coast Guard, whose retiring commandant Thad Allen looks more and more like he’s auditioning for a cushy job in the private (oil) sector every day,  has decided it would be best to cease their joint pressers.

Even President Obama has started distancing itself from the BP Tar Baby of late, both rhetorically and legally. On Tuesday he gave the green light to Attorney General Eric Holder to launch a preliminary criminal investigation of the company. Hayward must have made Holder’s day today when he said in an interview with The Financial Times:

“We did not have the tools you would want in your tool kit.”

Oops.

In testimony before the Senate on May 10, BP claimed that the contingency plan it filed pursuant to its 582 page permit application was working.  Said application stated that it could handle a spill 10x worse than the one we’ve seen to date:

May 31 (Bloomberg) — BP Plc said in permit applications for drilling in the Gulf of Mexico that it was prepared to handle an oil spill more than ten times larger than the one now spewing crude into the waters off the southern United States.

“Proper execution of the procedures detailed in this manual will help to limit environmental and ecological damage to sensitive areas as well as minimizing loss or damage to BP facilities in the event of a petroleum release,” the company said in its oil-spill response plan, filed with the U.S. Minerals Management Service in 2008.

The company listed as its worst-case scenario a blowout in an exploratory well 57 miles west of the disaster, in a valley on the seafloor known as Mississippi Canyon. It’s about 33 miles off the coast of Louisiana. Such a blowout could have spewed 250,000 barrels a day, according to the 582-page plan.

The representations show that BP overestimated its ability to control an oil spill in waters where it’s the biggest player in a Gulf energy extraction industry worth $52 billion a year, said Bob Deans, a spokesman with the Natural Resources Defense Council in Washington.

“BP has obviously overpromised and underdelivered,” Deans said. “They told us they had a plan that could deal with the consequences of a worst-case scenario. They don’t.”

Ya think?

Bloomberg also reports that BP might have to liquidate some of its prime assets to pay for the whole mess. It’s already lost close to 40% of its market value since the blowout began.

Karma is a bitch that way.