Dear Lord.

• Position: Vox Populist - British Petroleum and the Gulf oil spill - Viewpoint essay

The Brits are mad at us for being so mad at BE Lord Tebbit, for example, has thrown a royal hissy fit, calling President Obama's response to the Gulf oil explosion "a crude, bigoted, xenophobic display of partisan, political, presidential petulance against a multinational company."

Whoa there, your Lordship, you might want to save some of that breath for breathing! Let me try to translate America's feelings into English for you.

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We're not merely mad at BP because its well exploded, killing eleven workers and causing inestimable damage. We're at a furious boil because of the rank carelessness and callousness of BP's executives.

Start with carelessness. Not only did this huge, immensely profitable corporation take recklessly irresponsible safety shortcuts in the drilling of this dangerous well, but this is hardly its first disaster. For example, fifteen workers were killed at a BP refinery in Texas City, Texas, in 2005, due to safety failures so egregious that even George W.'s lackadaisical regulators were appalled. BP turns out to be notorious in the industry for its culture of ruthless corner-cutting, pursuing profits so singlemindedly that catastrophes are an inevitable result of its operational ethic. We have a word for this in America: greed.

Now, let's add devil-may-care arrogance to the mix. Before, during, and after their biblical-level blowout, BP's top executives made blatant lying their principal form of communication with us, interrupted only by recurring outbursts of callous, insulting, and astonishingly elitist comments. Let's review just a few of these gems:

"What the hell did we do to deserve this?" asked CEO Tony "Tone Deaf" Hayward in April, as though he and BP were victims of this calamity, not the perps.

"I'd like my life back," whined the narcissistic CEO in May, apparently not realizing that, actually, he still had his life, unlike the unlucky eleven BP workers who perished in the rig explosion.

"He is having some tare private time with his son," explained a BP spokeswoman when it was revealed on June 19 that Tony had slipped away from his job of grappling with the Gulf disaster. Indeed, the multimillionaire had scooted off to...