Wow. Talk about slick. When Republicans slapped Barton’s wrist for saying aloud what they all felt, Boehner and the GOP leadership slipped in some pretty telling language. To quote a commenter from the previous post, “Behold”:

“The oil spill in the Gulf is this nation’s largest natural disaster and stopping the leak and cleaning up the region is our top priority,” said the leaders. “Congressman Barton’s statements this morning were wrong. BP itself has acknowledged that responsibility for the economic damages lies with them and has offered an initial pledge of $20 billion dollars for that purpose.”

First, note that BP is painted as a responsible business: they are taking “responsibility” and “offered” and “pledged” to pay for economic damages. Nothing about Obama making them do this–no, it’s as if BP always intended to pay this much, and would naturally have done it without any outside pressure at all.

But look closer, and you’ll see something slicker than snot: the oil spill was a “natural disaster.” Got that? BP is not responsible for the disaster; no, they “acknowledged that responsibility for the economic damages lies with them,” a significant difference in wording.

In a few short sentences, Boehner managed to (1) distance himself from Barton’s gaffe, (2) make it seem like he is attacking BP by castigating a party member for apologizing to them, therefore gaining props from the public, (3) take credit for trying to stop the leak, saying it was “our” top priority, (4) remove all credit from Obama for getting BP to pay when clearly BP was doing all it could to avoid that, (5) make BP seem like a beneficent good guy, a responsible business which pledged and offered and took responsibility when in fact nothing of the sort is true, and (6) remove all feeling of actual responsibility from BP by qualifying the nature of their responsibility (economic, not actual; volunteered, not legal or actual) and painting the spill as an act of god, a “natural disaster,” as if BP wasn’t to blame and was instead somehow the victim of it all.

That’s pretty breathtaking.

So much for high-level Republicans “not taking BP’s side” in this.