Republican Cliff Stearns of Florida grilled BP’s Tony Hayward yesterday and made an utter ass of himself.
http://www.democracynow.org/2010/6/18/hawyard_testimony
REP. CLIFF STEARNS: The people of Florida, when I talk to them and they say there’s oil spilling on the coast, would it be appropriate to say that it’s because of BP’s reckless behavior? Yes or no?
TONY HAYWARD: It is a consequence of a big accident.
REP. CLIFF STEARNS: No, yes or no? Reckless behavior or not?
TONY HAYWARD: There is no evidence of reckless behavior.
REP. CLIFF STEARNS: So, you’re standing here, you’re saying here today that BP had no reckless behavior? That’s your position. Yes?
TONY HAYWARD: There is no evidence of reckless behavior.
REP. CLIFF STEARNS: No, yes or no? You’re saying BP has had no reckless behavior, is what you’re saying to us.
TONY HAYWARD: I have seen no evidence of reckless behavior.
REP. CLIFF STEARNS: OK. So you’re on record saying there’s been no reckless behavior. Has anyone in BP been fired because of this incident? Anybody?
TONY HAYWARD: Not—
REP. CLIFF STEARNS: Yes or no?
TONY HAYWARD: No, so far.
REP. CLIFF STEARNS: No people have been fired. So, your captain of the ship runs into New Orleans, spews all this oil, causes all this damage, from Alabama, Mississippi, Florida, Louisiana, and no one’s been fired?
TONY HAYWARD: Our investigation is ongoing.
REP. CLIFF STEARNS: So, let’s say the investigation goes for three years. Does that mean you wouldn’t fire anybody?
TONY HAYWARD: As the investigation draws conclusions, we will take the necessary action.
It’s not a good thing to outright *lie* in such a public forum with the cameras running. While Hayward seems to have been kind of a dumbass with respect to PR, note that in this exchange at least he couched his answers in very reasonable and respectable terms. He never said that there was no recklessness, just that he hasn’t seen *evidence* of recklessness. But Stearns outright lied and claimed that Hayward had said something quite different.
This exchange is reason number four bagrillion why federal officeholders need to be term limited… preferably to a single term. This hearing is not meant to accomplish a damn thing except to give these political yahoos a soapbox to stand on and blart, in the hopes that they’ll blart something that’ll make the electorate think that they are jsut neato keen and should be re-elected.
6 Responses to “Todays Embarassing Congresscritter”
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I’d give Senators 2 terms, Representatives 3.
We have built-in term limits: elections. There’s nothing that can be done about stupid voters — except education, which is the province of the government, thereby sabotaging the entire exercise.
If the “built-in” limits work so well, why do so many scumbags keep getting elected? And why is it OK to put in a constitutional amendment limiting the President to 2 terms, but not Senators?
> We have built-in term limits: elections.
Odd. When I lived in Illinois, Iowa, Colorado, California and Utah, I tried my best to vote Ted Kennedy out of office, but I never could find his name on the ballot.
If we *must* accept the presence of a government, and *must* accept that one of the jobs of the government is to protect people from themselves, then term limits would seem an obvious first step. Just as government has decided that certain substances and activities should be limited, controlled or outright banned since they cause moral and/or physical harm to the people who engage in them, certainly federal officeholding should be similarly limited and controlled, since it obviously causes moral harm to those who engage in it. We should term limit Senators and Representative for their own good.
> Odd. When I lived in Illinois, Iowa, Colorado, California and Utah, I tried my best to vote Ted Kennedy out of office, but I never could find his name on the ballot.
Irrelevant. If you’d lived in Massachusetts, you could have voted against him. (We still have “states,” but that won’t last long.) None of this causes moral harm to the elected, at least in their eyes.
They keep getting elected because the voters can’t imagine voting for anyone else. In most environments, doing the same thing over and over and getting the same results is considered “insane,” but not in American voting.
Don’t expect to see any change in the way things work as long as it works for those who get elected.
Term limits mean that Congresscritters have even less incentive to take a long view. If they can’t be re-elected then there’s no reason to moderate their ideology or the peculation. They’ll trash the system, steal everything they can, and retire to Bermuda. We’d be reduced to the status of Central American/African Banana Republic in short order.
They keep getting elected because they keep re-mapping their districts to only include people who will vote for them. Computers make that easy. Outlaw gerrymandering, require geometrically simple district shapes (squares and rectangles, within the limits imposed by state and national borders), and you’d find far fewer “safe” seats and more turnover in Congress.