The BP hearing just adjourned. You can find my play-by-play here, but for what it’s worth, here’s my takeaway.

Tonight and tomorrow (and hopefully just tonight and tomorrow) the talking heads will go on about Barton’s “apology” to BP and his apology for his apology. But to me the real scandal is how unprepared (or unwilling) Hayward was to answer most of the questions posed to him. I would say a majority, even a large majority, of his answers consisted of variations on the theme of “I don’t know, I wasn’t on the rig and I didn’t make that decision.” The effect was a heaping helping of congressional frustration and a performance that made the Goldman Sachs crew look like portraits of forthrightness.

To a certain extent, it is unrealistic to expect the CEO of one of the world’s largest corporations to be intimately aware of the tactical decisions made at each and every one of its thousands of drill sites, just as it would be unrealistic to expect President Obama to be plugged into every little tactical decision made by the thousands working to plug the leak and clean up the spill. Regardless, we tend to demand of our chieftains with a kind of omnipresence, because we need to believe that all errors are preventable, all tragedies avertable, so long as there is somebody who’s in charge, who’s responsible if things go FUBAR. And in this case it was the job of Tony Hayward — just as it is the job of President Obama — to at least make it seem like that is the case.

Certainly, Hayward should have been thoroughly briefed by now, 60 days later, on the chain of events that led up to the Deepwater Horizon explosion. Yet he was unprepared to answer questions about crucial decisions made by BP operators in the days and weeks before the explosion; and the drilling engineer he brought along specifically to address technical issues was consulted, by my count, only once (and to little effect).

This tells me either that Hayward is either incompetent or insincere. Or, perhaps, he has resigned himself to his fate as Congress’s whipping boy on his way out the door. (Consider, Hayward wouldn’t answer a question about whether he expected to remain CEO for much longer; and while BP Chairman Svanberg got the face-time with POTUS, Hayward was relegated to the congressional drubbing.)

Worst of all, Hayward’s evasiveness and/or ignorance will allow Democrats to further use the spill for political gain, which is all Congressional hearings are ever meant to do (when Congress thinks witnesses may have politically disadvantageous answers, they cancel them: see Waxman’s ill-conceived plan to harangue corporations for their legally required writedowns following the passage of Obamacare).

Oh, and for the record, I agree in part with Rep. Barton that the establishment of the escrow fund — over and above the claims process that is already in place, and run by an Obama administration hack sold as an “independent third party” — is, if not illegal, than at least extra-legal, and another example of Democrats’ selective disdain for the rule of law when it gets in the way of a government-run redistribution scheme.

But, what a stupid way to say it, Rep. Barton! Apologizing to BP????? “A tragedy of the first proportion???” Yeeesh.