This weekend, while terrible things continued happening in America and its waters, BP CEO Tony Hayward went on a yachting race, and Barack Obama played golf. Are you objectively hating them both in equal measures, right now?

Everyone in the White House is having so much fun making jokes about Tony Hayward "having his life back," on the big yachting race he went on this weekend. He is so out of touch that Tony Hayward!

"You know, look, if Tony Hayward wants to put a skimmer on that yacht and bring it down to the Gulf, we'd be happy to have his help," [Deputy press secretary] Bill Burton said. [...]

"Tony Hayward, I guess, took himself at his word that he was going to get his life back here. It's clear that he has," Burton said. "But what's important to us is that the people in the Gulf get their lives back. It's not so easy for them to just take a weekend away and forget about everything that's happening down there."

What else did Bill Burton say today, though, in the same briefing, about Barack Obama playing golf yesterday?

"I don't think that there's a person in this country that doesn't think that their president ought to have a little time to clear his mind," spokesman Bill Burton said today. [...]

Given "all the different issues that the president is dealing with, I think that a little time to himself on Father's Day weekend probably does us all good as American citizens," Burton said.

Well that's a more charitable take. And Tony Hayward and Barack Obama have very different jobs — one charged with cleaning up his own private company's mess, the other with cleaning up every mess everywhere for the United States government.

But here's a compromise: let's just not give a shit about what either of these executives do on an afternoon off and enjoy our own afternoons off, rather than all dealing with the more tiresome trials of faux outrage.

(Although still: ha ha, a "yachting excursion off the Isle of Wight.")

[Image via AP]