Gartman: BP Hearing Inquisition-Like and Amazingly Idiotic

Dennis Gartman, the man behind The Gartman Letter, a daily investor guide, compared Thursday’s questioning of BP Chief Executive Tony Hayward to the Spanish Inquisition.

Mr. Gartman called the congressional hearing over the oil disaster in the Gulf of Mexico “amazingly idotic, repetitive and ill-mannered.”

I am “embarrassed today for being American,” wrote Gartman.

BP CEO Tony Hayward, whose co. is responsibile for the explosion aboard the Deepwater Horizon drilling rig, which killed 11 men and has flooded the Gulf of Mexico with millions of gallons of oil, was subjected to a bipartisan barrage of criticism during a long, heated day of testimony on Capitol Hill.

CNBC: “And yet Mr. Hayward was made to remain before this commitee for hours yesterday, subjected to idiocy of the first order, expected to remain gentlemanly and in complete control…[despite] hopes, apparently, that he’d make one slip of the tongue that would doom BP to a legal hell,” Gartman wrote. “He did not. He kept his composure in a way we could not imagine that we could ever do under the same set of circumstances.
…
“He was the only one on the committee with a sense of fair play, with a sense of honor and who was in fact embarrassed by what his fellow members of Congress were doing before the cameras yesterday,” Gartman said. “We know nothing more about Mr. Barton but we know this: when others were taking the lowest road, he took the one much higher when the chips were down.”

Gartman also said that Rep. Joe Barton (R-Texas), who called Wednesday’s White House meeting with BP executives “a $20 billion “shakedown”, was the only one on the committee with a sense of honor and fair play.

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