Rep. Joe Linus Barton is right and should be our next President.
You dKos folks are just a little too pessimistic about this "spill'. You gotta look on the bright side of it all. Put yourself in Joe's shoes, maybe you too will feel that comfortable wad of bucks warming both rear cheeks.
It's just a matter of time, that is oil to sea water ratio, until some oil company is going to determine that it will be more profitable to build a refinery right at the shoreline and start refining the Gulf of Mexico oil-seawater emulsion/slime instead of paying for expensive crude out of a pipeline. Former fish industry boaters can be employed/deployed with booms to round up surface crude to concentrate at an offshore intake pipe sites. And since there will a lot of sea water in the mix , the sea water could be mined for rare metals in tandem with the organics/minerals/halogens extraction processes. The effluent from the extraction processes could be made as pure as rainwater and be piped/sold to major metropolitan areas whose water supply aquifers are irrevocably depleted and/or poisoned by leaching of toxic wastes.
BP would surely be made more proud and richer when they obtain royalties through patenting their unique method of exploiting offshore fossil fuels, creating more high paying oil industry jobs for Gulf Coast residents and the inevitable influx of newcomers seeking a livable income in the most profitable industry on Earth in the history of mankind and Earth's lesser life forms.
Naturally such an innovative and profitable technology will be copied throughout the world meaning greater competition from the Caspian Sea, Black Sea regions when they pounce on such a technological innovations. They have the advantage over America by their having closed bodies of water allowing for much higher oil to water concentrations to be be obtained requiring less energy wasted in extraction processes.
So it doesn't matter if Congressman Joe Barton was cognizant of all of these inevitable benefits of the BP discovery/invention when he apologized to BP on behalf of the U.S. government, his intuition is a gift which the United States should embrace and foster in the interests of national security, now and forever. Amen.