There was something galling about BP Chief Executive Officer Tony Hayward attending a yacht race last weekend while his company’s runaway oil well continued pummeling both wildlife and livelihood for an eighth week in the Gulf of Mexico.

Ya think?  11 people were killed, and what looks like an entire ecosystem spanning multiple countries is pretty much history.  People without yachts would be in jail, not at a regatta, for that sort of tomfoolery.

Sure, an argument could be made that a Father’s Day outing with his son is reasonable, but hey, Tony, ever hear of a backyard barbecue? Something about the blue waters off the Isle of Wight and, let’s face it, the idea of a rich guy playing with his big boat just didn’t sit right. It was, critics said, a public relations fiasco. You couldn’t flip on a television or radio without hearing a talking head bloviate about Hayward and his yacht.

Ah, bring in “the children,” and blame the “bloviators.”   Never mind that the vast majority of bloviators are to this day still screaming, “drill, baby, drill,”  and the whole damn thing was sponsored by the heavily yachted JPMorgan Chase, to boot.  Statistically, children whose parents have yachts don’t need a lot of sympathy and quality time with their thieving and incompetent Daddies to “succeed;” no matter how dumb, worthless, or self-indulgent they turn out to be, they do OK in life anyway.  People without yachts are just not worried about missed Father’s Days for that bunch, barbeque or not.

Even White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel took time to weigh in, declaring, “I think we can all conclude that Tony Hayward is not going to have a second career in PR consulting. This has just been part of a long line of PR gaffes and mistakes.”

“Even” Rahm Emanuel?  Taking advantage of a political opportunity?  Now I’m certain that this editorial was written by a four-year old. With a yacht.

That was the tone of the weekend when it came to BP: Its PR savvy since the April 20 explosion that killed 11 people and sprang an untamable gusher deserves an F. And it probably does.

Probably?

But when stories drag on long enough, the relentlessness of the 24-hour news cycle begins to look for stories within the story. And the problem with this story is that it moves the eye from more relevant concerns: massive numbers of dead and oiled animals, an effect on the ecosystem that won’t be known for years and questions about how forthcoming BP is being with access and information.

Ah, yes.  The job of all of us now is to become bird-bathing sob sisters, looking “forward, not back,” as the miscreant’s yacht slips past the horizon.  BP’s egregious lying might be a problem, but the fact that it’s run by a criminally incompetent dilletante with a yacht named “Bob” shouldn’t matter a whit.  And this whole boring story of drive-by yachtings has dragged on too long, anyway.

More than once, Hayward has seemed like a dunce (who can forget his immortal “I’d like to have my life back” after those 11 workers had lost theirs?). But after a weekend of discussing his lack of PR skills, let’s remember not to be distracted from what’s coming out of BP’s well by what’s coming out of Tony Hayward’s mouth.

No, what we’re distracted by is what’s coming out of his wallet, when it’s abundantly clear that the “dunce” deserves none of it.  What we inevitably find, once again, aboard the yachts of the real Randian “producers” are bumbling fools who couldn’t, and haven’t, done an honest day’s work in their entire lives, yet they and their apologists nonetheless never tire of telling the rest of us we must now, given our straitened circumstances, tighten our belts and eat Nine Lives in our golden years so the yachting set can go on running the world in the style to which they’ve unaccountably grown accustomed.   The problem the Tribune steadfastly refuses to see is that those of us who don’t have yachts have to actually perform to hang onto our livelihoods, and we don’t appreciate that people far above us are allowed to make huge, earth-shattering mistakes and never suffer even the slightest consequences.

The rising tides of the last 30-odd years have indeed lifted some boats, but nothing under forty feet, as the Hayward episode starkly illustrates.  Will someone tell the Chicago Tribune?

To anyone with a passing acquaintance with the bankrupt Tribune Company that came from reading its newspapers, it would seem counterintuitive that the charlatans responsible for the current crummy simulacra of those once-respectable, if not great, papers that now land with barely a sound on long-suffering porches from coast to coast would be getting bonuses this year, if ever.  The organ with which I’m most familiar (well, the other organ…), the Los Angeles Times, has, under the Tribune Company’s “stewardship,” gone from being the Paper of Record of the West into being a shoddy, disreputable advertiser whose current claim to fame, aside from selling its editorial content to advertisers, stems from having “discovered” Jonah Goldberg. ( That’s something the Pulitzer Committee is sure to notice….)

Beside the fact that ordinary people tend to think of bankruptcy as a time of suffering and humbling austerity, the Tribune Company is, remember, in bankruptcy for a reason; they shat all over their product and now no one wants to buy it.  But like all worthless, unaccountable monopolies, they have a lot of hungry executive mouths to feed, and unlike their many creditors, (not to mention their cheated employees and customers…) the big boys will be fed.  Lots.

By Michael Oneal | Tribune Co. plans to pay 35 of its top executives $14.9 million in additional 2009 bonuses, a court filing revealed late Monday, despite pointed opposition to the proposal from several key constituents in its 17-month-old Chapter 11 bankruptcy case.

The company describes the bonuses, devised as two plans, as rewards for steering the company through bankruptcy court while generating total operating cash flow of $494 million in 2009.

Ah, that “reward” must be like the “retention bonuses” of which Wall Street is so fond, except for the niggling fact that it comes from a dying industry with no jobs available, and goes to people who disgraced their company, financially and strategically, and will continue to do so.

The payments would supplement $42.1 million in management incentive bonuses the court allowed Tribune Co. to pay in February to approximately 670 managers, including most of the executives included in the most senior group.

See, it turns out that the $14 million is really more like $60 million, (since February, that is…) which is money being directly stolen from creditors, readers, and employees, for the feat of having ripped off the same three stakeholders so successfully.  Just like the bank bonuses, and just like all the rest of them. it’s  money for nothing, and perks for free.  Naturally, Tribune resorted to a “government” bankruptcy court to expensively bless all this theft, since thanks to the magic of the “market,” corporate thieves cash in while less well-dressed criminals serve hard time.  Innocence is, as the Free Market would dictate, most typically determined by the price of one’s lawyer’s suit. (see Simpson, O.J.)

The Tribune Company’s outrageous cashing in on utter failure merely lands atop the massive pile of other fraudulent, freeloading enterprises gone Galt like BP, Massey Energy, Goldman Sachs, Enron, Blackwater, Halliburton, and on and on.  Not a one would last a day in the Free Market without the tender mercies of their supposedly overbearing sugar daddies, the American Taxpayer, and it’s our job to just pay up, because a lot of influential folks with a lot of money decided that this would be so.  We must Look Forward once again, but with lighter wallets, something we seem to be getting used to by now.

Please, bring back the welfare queens… at least they weren’t so expensive.