Don't worry, be oily

I don't sleep well. I know this mostly because every night I make my bed, and every morning the sheet has been pushed off. I can only assume that if I were subject to one of those sleep studies where they film you during the night, you'd see a great deal of tossing and turning. I also usually have pretty vivid dreams.

I'm mentioning all this, because I have a terrible sick certainty that all the people who ought to be held to account for the oil spill, from the oil companies to the white house, sleep just fine.

Case in point:

Don't worry about that pesky oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, BP CEO Tony Hayward says: It's "relatively tiny" compared to the "very big ocean."

Hayward launched this novel defense of the worst spill in U.S. history during an interview with the Guardian that deserves a full read, especially with BP fighting the Obama administration's push to make the company pay the full tab for cleanup costs. The BP chief executive acknowledged for the first time that he expects his future with the company to be "judged by the nature of the response" to the current crisis; this may help explain his stream of delaying tactics and excuses.

"We will fix it. I guarantee it. The only question is we do not know when," Hayward told the Guardian. "The Gulf of Mexico is a very big ocean. The amount of volume of oil and dispersant we are putting into it is tiny in relation to the total water volume."

To paraphrase Jon Stewart: You're not helping your case!