From Thursday night’s Fox News All-Stars.

On the House Energy and Commerce hearing on BP’s role in the Gulf:

These hearings are always just political theater. Nobody expects real information and you’re certainly not going to get real information when you have a CEO whose company is under investigation — criminally by the attorney general of the United States. Of course he’s going to be cautious, non-disclosive, and lawyered-up.
I must say, however, that I kind of welcome these rituals. We haven’t had a good Inca ritual slaughter since the Goldman Sachs hearings. I’ve talked about this before: They take a virgin to the top of a mountain, offer her to the gods, and everybody goes home happy – of course, except the virgin. Here, because we have a scarcity of virgins, we send up a CEO instead, they whack him around for a whole day, and everybody goes home happy. The only difference is that our procedure has less blood, but a lot more talking. I’m not sure which is preferable.
Nobody expects anything out of these. And [BP CEO Tony] Hayward, he didn’t play into the expectation of the Democrats. He played it very neutral, and that’s why nothing was learned.

On Joe Barton’s apology to BP:

I think that wins the award for the most politically stupid statement of the year — and we can retire it right now in June. It’s absolutely astonishing. The guy apologizes and then he apologizes for his apology in one day. I think that’s the world indoor record.
You don’t express sympathy for a corporation that’s soiled and destroyed, practically is destroying — the Gulf Coast. What you can say is that we don’t like the precedent of the federal government using its leverage and threats of prosecution to force companies into acting against what might be their own interest. It’s not a good precedent.
We had to do it in this case because we want to protect the income of the people in the Gulf who’ve suffered.
But it’s been done in the case of the nationalization of the auto companies. It started with the Bush administration where [Treasury Secretary Henry] Paulson brought in the head[s] of the six banks and said: I’m now your partner, you’re going to do as I say, and they had to, the way it’s done in banana republics, except we didn’t have a gun on the table
It’s a tradition which is a bad one, and it ought to stop . . .