Flaming Douchebag of the Week: Joe Barton

Rep. Joe Barton (R—Shitbucket) is deeply concerned about the BP oil spill. Wait, no, he’s not concerned about the worst ecological devastation in America’s history. He doesn’t give a fuck about millions of lowly working-class types whose livelihoods are gone.

But he’s having a tantrum because our Kenyan Muslim Socialist president said mean things to BP.

Obama is requiring BP to establish a $20 billion fund to help compensate the people whose careers and lives have been destroyed by BP’s negligence. Barton called it a “$20 billion shakedown” of BP, and said: “I'm ashamed of what happened in the White House.”

For the past year and a half, rightwing bloggers’ favorite soundbite has been “apologizing for America.” That’s exactly what Joe “I bend over for oil companies” Barton has just done. So far there hasn’t been a peep out of the Right, for some odd reason.

Massachusetts Democrat Ed Markey told Barton to bring his knees back together, get up off the floor and quit humping the oil industry (in so many words).

He said the $20 billion compensation fund was “not a slush fund, not a shakedown. ... It was the government of the United States working to protect the most vulnerable citizens that we have in our country right now, the residents of the Gulf. It's BP's spill, but it is America’s ocean, and it is America's citizens who are being harmed. ... No, this is not a shakedown of the company. This is, in my opinion, the American government working at its best.”