Joe Blow

Republican Rep. Joe Barton gave us yet another variation on what BP really stands for (Blowing Patrons) and proved it on the floor of the House yesterday when he actually apologized to BP executives testifying before Congress. What was he apologizing for?

For the $20 billion escrow fund that President Barack Obama extracted from British Petroleum to help pay for the unprecedented damage their negligence and recklessness had caused. To hear Barton talk, the Chief Executive was wearing a pimp suit borrowed from Jimmy "Superfly Snooka" O'Keefe and pimp-sticked the poor English johns of BP with a bent coathanger. In fact, Barton called it a "shakedown" and "a tragedy of the first proportion", whatever that means.

It ought to be mentioned for the sake of coincidence that Joe Blow had received something like $1.7 million from oil and gas during his Congressional career and he's damned grateful for it. "Thank you, sir. May I have another wad? Gobble gobble."

His remarks were so nakedly rooted in corruption and fucked-up priorities that he even made Minority Leader Weepy John Boehner crawl away from him in disgust

Later on that day, Congressman Norm Crosby had released this incomprehensible apology: "If anything I have said this morning has been misconstrued to the opposite effect, I want to apologize for that misconstrued misconstruction."

Who's writing apologies on Capitol Hill for the Republicans these days? Sarah "Drill, baby, drill" Palin?