Obama: CEOs Suck, So Boycott Oil

REPORTER: Have you spoken directly to Tony Hayward, the CEO of BP?

PRESIDENT OBAMA: I have not spoken to him directly and here's the reason. Because my experience is when you talk to a guy like a BP CEO, he's going to say all the right things to me. I'm not interested in words. I'm interested in actions.

WILLY WONKA: After all, we have so much time and so little to do! Wait. Strike that- reverse it.

There it is, in black and white: The reason that President Obama has taken so long to sit down with BP CEO Tony Hayward- who, as head of not only the responsible party, but also the party whose resources are clearly the best equipped to handle the oil spill, ought to have been number one on Obama’s schedule- is due to the simple fact that the president just doesn’t like CEOs. There are a number of questions to address in response to what is a clear display of Obama’s bizarre political convictions: Just who is “like” a CEO, anyway? A businessman? A rich man? A private citizen whose company provides employment to several thousand people? (No thanks to the stimulus, thank you very much.)

The liberal prejudice towards the oil industry is no great secret, and thus this arrogant behavior, tactless as it was for a president speaking to the press, comes as anything but a surprise. True, he didn’t pull a James Cameron and accuse BP of being nothing but a pack of hopeless morons, but his disdain for the oil provider was evident enough- a disdain which, shared by most of the American people at this juncture, is hardly objectionable in and of itself. What proves more objectionable is the source from which the present Commander-In-Chief derives his particular brand of loathing. Turning back the clock a year or so, Obama didn’t object to the corporation's estimated $77,000 in campaign contributions over the course of his short political career- estimates which make Obama the biggest recipient of BP’s voluntary contributions in the last two decades. Predestined divine justice for the company? If the thought brings you satisfaction, I suppose so.

Unfortunately, much of the public at large has responded in like manner, with many drivers openly boycotting BP gas stations as a political statement of supposed solidarity with the affected residents of the Gulf Coast. BP gas station owners have been hit hard as they feel the weight of this allegedly compassionate protest. At my own place of employment, I have overheard coworkers angrily discussing this very topic, expressing nothing less than a potent hatred for the oil giant (No mention of the idiotic environmental policies which have forced oil workers to drill ever more dangerously far offshore in the first place, but that’s a separate issue). The conventional wisdom seems to be that hurting BP- including those they employ at gas stations across the country- will somehow result in a positive effect on the gulf.

In words of the immortal Gene Wilder, “WRONG, SIR!!”

I’m no expert in the economy, the oil industry, or in the causes and remedies of the country's ongoing unemployment problem, but you don’t need any credentials in those areas to expect, within a reasonable margin of error, that 1.) boycotting a large gasoline provider 2.) with employees in the upper tens of thousands 3.) in the middle of what some have called the worst recession since the Great Depression will cost possibly THOUSANDS of people to lose their once-secure jobs at BP and find themselves desperate for new employment, which they are less likely to find if economic woes persist. So much for compassionate boycotts, huh?

“So shines a good deed in a weary world", I guess...