Tom Donohue’s Joe Barton Moment

"I am personally troubled about the way we have been treating not only business leaders but – let's go there – bankers, people that run health-care companies, people that run oil companies. They are being hauled up to the Congress ... and beat up like unruly children for the TV cameras.”

– Chamber of Commerce President Tom Donohue, speaking to reporters

Stop me if youve heard this one:

Tom Donohue, the President and CEO of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, goes in front of a roomful of reporters at the Christian Science Monitor breakfast last month and really steps in it. Says something so outrageous, tone-deaf and revealing of where his bread is buttered, it sounds like a parody.

No, not the quote about how he’s going to “find out a way” to get the government to pay for the BP oil spill clean-up. And not the one about how Congress should not raise the liability cap against BP.

If you can believe it, the third-most insulting thing Donohue said at the breakfast is the quote above. He’s “personally troubled.”  But not, say, for the shrimp boaters and fishermen in the Gulf who’ve lost their livelihoods.  Apparently what keeps Donohue up at nights is the way the Wall Street bankers who crashed our economy, the insurance companies who have jacked up rates and denied coverage indiscriminately, and- let’s just go there- “people that run oil companies” have been forced to explain their behavior toward the U.S. taxpayers in front of their elected representatives. 

So if you wondered who in the world Joe Barton and others on Capitol Hill are speaking for when they apologize to BP for asking them to pay to clean up their mess, now you know.