I’ll be honest — I was confused by President Obama’s Oval Office Speech on Tuesday night.  It was not-so-uplifting and / or reassuring.

But here we are still absorbing Wednesday’s news . . . and $20B is a great start.  Granted, we’d rather have never gotten into this mess, literally and figuratively.  But let’s hand it to the President.

Good Job, Mr. President.  $20B is a very good answer — given the circumstances — to “What have you done for me lately?”

[My one, slight defense of President Obama is that I did listen to his speech, not watch it, later again on Tuesday evening.  There was some very strong language that I think earlier times would have paid much greater attention to -- That language was intentional, it was on the mark, and it was blunt . . . and was utterly undercut by today's overproduced and hyped media expectations.]

What we’re seeing is the failure of the ‘hands-off’ approach to business.  And we’re seeing firsthand what that failure can yield.  Is this even the worst case?  I’d like to think so (though there is that pesky thing last year about avoiding the next Great Depression).

This is exactly what happens when Capitalism is left unbounded and unchecked.  And this is exactly what happens when Government doesn’t play the role it should.

[BTW, a big Thank You to President Reagan.  I guess "Government is the problem."  So much for that Social Good, huh?]

Writ large (as if it weren’t ‘writ large’ enough already), this is why both the Republican Party and their Siamese twin the Tea Party are so screwed up.  They don’t get it.  Government actually does play a necessary role in today’s society.  It’s not at all that Government is too big or too intrusive — It’s simply that for much too long Government has been too ineffective.

Why exactly that is the case is beyond me (that Government has been too ineffective).  A case could be made that, while certain times over the past few decades have not been great, they certainly haven’t been the standing-in-a-bread-line or starving-children-in-Africa kind of bad that America has been fortunate enough to watch (and help with) at a distance.  Crisis breeds Ingenuity and Gumption to both finally see and solve real problems (or so some might say).  It does fall in line with the more recent argument that we’ve gotten a little too ‘fat and lazy’.

But let’s get back to core politics.  In today’s hearing, Representative Joe Barton (R/Oil – Texas) actually referred to President Obama’s meeting with BP as a ’shakedown’ and a ‘$20B slush fund’.  Seriously.  Watch.

Does Representative Barton get at all that — as he’s talking — there’s a live feed of the barrels and barrels and barrels of oil still upwelling from BP’s drill site!?! Exactly how much oil did spill into the Gulf over the time it took Representative Barton to apologize to BP?!?  He sure took his time to make sure he really apologized!

But, to be fair, there are plenty of other Republican and the like that simply don’t seem to get it. This — This kind of incident is exactly why people want Government. The Republican ’small / no Government’ argument simply doesn’t hold water, let alone oil.

Representative Barton, just like Senatorial Candidate Rand Paul (R-SC), owes the People his apology.  I’d even go further and say he owes a direct apology to the People’s of Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, and Florida.  Apologizing to the offending party during opening remarks is NO way to represent the People’s business, even if they’re not the people who elected him.