Minimizing the Egregious

Pro-tip for BP CEO Tony Hayward: relativism is probably not the best PR strategy when your company is responsible for an oil spill that, by some accounts, is already far worse than the Exxon Valdez spill.

Hayward recently added some erudite context to the crisis that likely only stems from years of experience in the industry:

"The Gulf of Mexico is a very big ocean. The amount of volume of oil and dispersant we are putting into it is tiny in relation to the total water volume"

Lucky for us the Gulf of Mexico is so big! Not just big, but 'very big.' That leaves much more room for the wholesale destruction of the ecosystems while BP bitches about the costs and liabilities of cleaning up their mess and fiddles with top hats, underwater robotic open-heart surgery, untold volumes of toxic chemicals, and God knows what other solutions with which they are currently fumbling.

I wonder what other great analogies could be made from Hayward's logic? Maybe the Iraq war isn't so bad, what with it representing such a tiny slice of the global population. The amount of lives lost and money spent in funding it are tiny in relation!