I certainly hope Rand Paul doesn’t read this. Otherwise, he may accuse me of sounding “un-American” for my forthcoming vociferous criticism of British Petroleum.

If Ron Paul’s son gets burned out as an ophthalmologist and loses the upcoming U.S. Senate race in Kentucky, he could always get a job as a public relations guy for BP. Lord knows, he’s tried to excuse the actions of those bastards at BP nearly as much as the bastards at BP themselves.

Last month, I criticized intellectually dishonest conservatives for trying to prematurely tag the Gulf of Mexico oil catastrophe as Obama’s Katrina. I felt it was extremely unfair and disingenuous to do so just about a week after the Deepwater Horizon explosion.

Only a couple of weeks later, though, some of those same conservatives were on the air trying to downplay the whole ordeal, saying that maybe it wasn’t that bad. In a matter of days, they went from suggesting that the BP disaster would be an indelible stain on Obama’s legacy to suggesting that it really wasn’t a disaster at all.

Well, which is it? Is it Obama’s Katrina, or is it just his unnamed tropical wave? Sorry, but you can’t have it both ways.

One of these downplayers was Brit Hume of (who else?) Fox News. On May 16, nearly a month after the April 20 explosion, he disbelievingly queried, “Where’s the oil?” Since a substantial amount of oil hadn’t hit the shores, he apparently was wary of the estimates of crude at large in the gulf.

To hell with projections made by “experts” and “scientists.” If Brit didn’t see it, it must not be there, which made me wonder: Where was this level of skepticism from Fox News’ senior political analyst during discussions about Saddam’s alleged weapons of mass destruction?

Just because your name is “Brit,” you’re not required to be an apologist for those Bloody Poms.

Hume then attempted to further make light of the impending environmental apocalypse by claiming that BP is nowhere near as irresponsible in releasing unrefined crude into ocean waters as Mother Earth herself is.

Hume pontificated to Juan Williams on Fox News Sunday: “You know where the greatest source of oil that seeps into the ocean is? It’s from natural seepage from subterranean deposits. That’s where most of it comes from, not from drilling accidents.”

Wow, Brit. That makes my fellow South Louisiana natives and residents and me feel so much better about the very possible extinction of the Cajun culture as we know it. Thanks for brightening our day with such a reassuring observation.

I guess folks whose farms, homes, and lives are destroyed by a busted dam should take solace in the fact that their valley would have likely seen that much water through natural rainfall. The fact that it all comes in just a few minutes rather than over the course of a year shouldn’t matter.

Following that same logic, the Chernobyl accident wasn’t really all that bad, either. Sure, the explosion blew deadly radiation into the atmosphere over most of Eastern and Northern Europe, but compared to the amount released by the sun, it’s just a drop in the bucket.

I can’t help but wonder if Brit Hume was cheating off of BP CEO Tony Hayward’s notes when he made that galling statement.

In the May 14 edition of The Guardian, Hayward arrogantly called the oil spill “relatively tiny.” He also told the British national newspaper: “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.”

I’m sure I’m not the only enraged person in this state who would like to demonstrate to Dr. Hayward how illogical that statement is. Perhaps a drop or two of cyanide in a gallon of water would do the trick.

OK, maybe that’s a bit harsh. Besides, the executives at BP seem a bit sensitive to criticism, as evidenced when CNN’s Candy Crowley asked BP Managing Director Bob Dudley, “How do you respond to the idea that you’ve even got people on Capitol Hill that don’t believe a word you’re saying?”

Dudley responded with, “Those words hurt a little bit, because we've been open about what we’re doing.”

Bob “Do Right” Dudley is right. Just like the hole at the bottom of the gulf, the folks at BP have been “open.” After all, they voluntarily released video of the blown-out well spewing oil and gas into the gulf immediately after they got a camera down there when, instead, they could have sat on it for days and weeks, only to release it after much arm twisting by public officials and members of the media.

In the interest of being “open,” they certainly didn’t try to lowball the amount of oil being released every day. No, they were straightforward from the get-go in telling us that this would likely be many times worse than the Exxon Valdez spill, instead of initially saying that this spill was small and would not reach shore.

Also, being an “open” corporation, BP never tried to keep the truth from the American people and the rest of the world by, with the help of the U.S. Coast Guard, threatening to arrest a CBS crew for attempting to attain footage of a fouled beach near the mouth of the Mississippi River. Nay, verily, an “open” entity such as BP has no qualms with a free press.

And BP has been completely “open” about its continued use of the dispersant Corexit. The company ceased using the product that’s been banned in Britain for 10 years immediately after the EPA said to, instead of continuing to deploy nearly a million gallons of it while hundreds of thousands of gallons of a much less harmful and more effective dispersant sat in Houston — preordered by BP — just waiting to be used.

BP has also been totally “open” about how it has close business ties and is financially intertwined with Nalco, the parent company that makes Corexit. Absolutely.

In addition to attempting to redefine the word “open,” BP is also trying to assign a standard to the term “modest,” as in the environmental impact from the oil would be “very, very modest.” That’s what Dr. Hayward told Sky News on May 18, right about the time oil began to inundate Louisiana marshlands while the well continued to gush unchecked.

If the impact along our coast is “very, very modest,” then Michelle “Bombshell” McGee is positively “bashful.” Likewise, Lady Gaga is absolutely “demure.”

Someone I know actually had the nerve to suggest that Hayward sincerely believed that assessment because the oil is light sweet crude and would be relatively weathered and easy to get out of the wetlands.

In the words of another friend, Royce Nugent: “Light sweet crude is a real accurate description just like chocolate hazelnut dog turds is an accurate description. Oil is oil.” I couldn’t have said it better myself.

I’m sick of people trying to make excuses for these Bumbling Pricks. At the risk of sounding like James Carville, I think the next person who tries to downplay the effects by invoking the term “light sweet crude” should be forced to chug a gallon of the stuff.

If it’s too thick and sludgy, maybe he can wash it down with some of that EPA-approved Corexit. Since BP has sprayed approximately a million gallons (and counting) of the dispersant into the Gulf of Mexico, we’ll likely be ingesting it anyway once the fisheries open back up.

I don’t know if you saw the underwater photos taken by Philippe Cousteau, Jacques Cousteau’s grandson. The dispersed oil clouded the waters as deep as 50 feet below the surface.

It was nasty. It looked like Cousteau was diving into a frat house toilet on Sunday morning. The gulf waters looked like Aquaman had eaten some really greasy tacos. (Hey, it is the Gulf of Mexico.)

Seriously, though, if I ever get a chance to deliver a “junk shot” of my own to any of the executives from BP, I’ll probably need someone to come bail my ass out of jail. When they defy the EPA and continue to spray into the gulf extreme amounts of a toxic compound, which, like I said, has been banned in their home country of Britain for 10 years, I can’t help but interpret that as, “This stuff is poisonous to Brits, but it’s good enough for you dumb coonasses.”

I have to admit, though, that the name Corexit is quite apt for this situation. “BP fuxt it up, but they’re trying to Corexit.”

Speaking of nomenclature, my favorite new moniker for BP is Butt Plug. They seemingly can do everything “butt plug” the damn hole.

Now, as I stated earlier, last month, I railed on people who tried to immediately pin this on Obama as his Katrina. I insisted that until Obama said BP was doing a heckuva job, it wasn’t truly his Katrina.

Well, I’m not sure if this is Obama’s Katrina yet, but it’s getting pretty damn close. When Coast Guard Admiral Thad Allen, the National Incident Commander for the coordinated response, said on May 23 that he trusts Tony Hayward, when nearly everyone living in South Louisiana wanted to punch that limey bastard in the mouth, it struck me as a quasi-“heckuva job, Brownie” moment.

How can anyone, especially the Commandant of the U.S. Coast Guard, trust that smug sumbitch? Is the accent that disarming?

I know, with many Americans, a British accent oftentimes leads to undeserved credibility (i.e., Scott Rogers & the Geico Gecko), but just because an unscrupulous executive like Hayward answers Allen’s phone calls promptly, that doesn’t make him trustworthy. It just means he’s a polite criminal.

In all honesty, though, I really think the comparison to Katrina doesn’t apply here. This is way worse than Katrina.

For one, we didn’t have to depend on Katrina to clean up her mess. Secondly, Katrina didn’t try to mislead and outright lie to us about the severity of the damage she caused. Third, Katrina didn’t hire day laborers to hide the bodies floating in the streets from the national media and the White House press corps. Plus, while Katrina may have killed a couple thousand people, BP may very well kill an entire culture.

As for those who worry about BP running out of money before paying for all the cleanup and claims, fret not. The check’s going to clear. The company made $14 billion in profit last year and has $7 billion in the bank. The only kind of bankruptcy it’s eligible to claim is moral bankruptcy.

I’ve tried keeping abreast of every development by monitoring several news sources covering the disaster. Yet, I’m still left with several lingering, nagging questions that no one can seem to answer to my satisfaction.

For starters, if Bob Dudley compared BP’s failed so-called “Top Kill” procedure to “an arm-wrestling match of two equally strong forces,” why didn’t they call it “Over the Top Kill”? Besides, I’d much rather see Sly Stallone deliver a press conference — with vascular arms and cap turned backwards — about the latest attempt to cap the well. His incoherent mumbling would inspire more confidence than anything spewing from BP Chief Operating Officer Doug Suttles’ pie hole.

Why is the government still referring to BP as the “responsible party”? From everything I’ve seen, they’re the “irresponsible party.”

After several weeks of continuous coverage, why is Rachel Maddow the only member of the national media not from Louisiana who’s learned to correctly pronounce Congressman Charlie Melancon’s name?

With all that nasty sludge in the marshes, where the hell is Walter Boasso with his box of Tide and garden hose?